32 NATURE OF CAPITAL AND INCOME [Crar. IT 
city of Boston, but is really owned by the citizens, who are 
the true beneficiaries. Each individual who has the right 
to enjoy it is to that extent a part owner. 
It is not uncommon thus to have, between a property 
right and the wealth underlying it, several layers of prop- 
erty. A man who owns an ordinary foreign bank note has 
a claim upon the property of the bank. But the bank’s 
property consists, for the most part, not of tangible wealth, 
but of promissory notes and other claims on merchants. 
These notes represent a part right in the wealth (including 
persons) of the community; consequently the holder of a 
bank note quite unconsciously owns a claim upon the dry 
goods, groceries, and other wealth of merchants, which make 
good the debts of these merchants to the bank. 
In the case of United States bank notes he also owns an 
alternative claim on government bonds, and therefore on 
the taxable wealth which makes these bonds good. It is 
erroneous to think of a bank note as representing simply 
money. This is true of gold certificates; for there are in 
the United States Treasury as many actual gold dollars as 
there are certificates in circulation. A bank note, on the 
other hand, is made good, not solely by the metallic reserve 
of the bank, but also by the other property or “assets,” 
which the bank is constantly changing or transforming into 
cash. The Bank of England, for instance, had £60,000,000 
of notes out at a given date, and only £43,000,000 of gold 
in its vaults. But the £17,000,000 deficiency which thus 
seemed to exist was represented by securities, that is, other 
property held by the bank. 
§8 
A third guide is that the correspondence between prop- 
erty and wealth is a contemporaneous correspondence. 
That is to say, the existing property rights are rights to 
the use of existing wealth, so that existing wealth underlies 
all existing property rights. It would seem at first sight