BORROWERS AND LENDERS 87 
definitely. But in due time all prices rise to conform to the new 
quantity of media of payment, and money becomes no more 
abundant than it had been originally. It is only during the period 
in which the volume of bank notes is expanding, he concluded, 
that the community gains, and the benefit is finally lost in the 
inevitable reaction.” Yet he has admitted enough to damage 
materially his own assertion that banks can but advance what 
they have in turn received from others. And many shared this 
inconsistency with him. 
I turn now to a writer who avoided the absurd dogma that ex- 
pansion of bank credit is a direct creation of capital, and yet took 
a conscious stand against the doctrine that a bank is but the go- 
between for borrowers and lenders. Robert Hare was a chemist 
of Philadelphia whose scientific investigations gained him an 
honorary degree of Doctor of Medicine, first from Yale in 1806 
and then from Harvard a decade later. From 1818 to 1847 he 
occupied the chair of chemistry at the University of Pennsyl- 
vania. He found time, amid scholarly researches in his own sub- 
ject, to write several articles and pamphlets of merit on currency 
problems, and had already interested himself in finance in 1810. 
It is his Brief View of the Policy and Reosurces of the United States 
of that date which we have now to examine.? 
Credit, said Hare, must not be regarded as merely subsidiary 
to specie, in the place of which it occasionally serves as a repre- 
sentative. It is rather to be said, that “credit constitutes an 
original, and in some respects a peculiarly beneficial medium of 
interchange in trade.” It frequently enables those who can utilize 
certain things most advantageously to gain possession of them. 
! Elsewhere Gouge recognized, as did many of his contemporaries, the hardships 
of maladjustments in incomes that attend a rising price level. 
* Gouge, Short History of Paper Money and Banking in the United States (1833) 
p. 24. 
3 This work was published anonymously, but its authorship was acknowledged 
in the preface of a later one, Proofs that Credit as Money . . . is Preferable to Coin 
1834). 
Besides these pamphlets, Hare wrote several other essays on money and banking 
during the rest of his life. (See the Bibliography of this study.) His total contribu- 
tions to the subject were not great in volume, but they include many significant 
points.