To begin with, if the demand for money accommodation arises from an unfavourable national balance of payments and thereby implies a drain of gold, the matter is very simple. The bills of exchange are discounted in bank-notes. The bank-notes are exchanged for gold by the Bank itself, in its issue department, and this gold is exported. It is as though the Bank paid out gold directly, without the mediation of notes, on discounting bills. Such an increased demand, which may in certain cases be £7 to £10 million, naturally does not add a single five-pound note to the country's domestic circulation. If it is now said that the Bank advances capital, and not currency, this means two things. First, that it does not advance credit, but actual values, a part of its own capital or of capital deposited with it. Secondly, that it does not advance money for inland, but for international circulation, that it advances world-money; and for this purpose money must always exist in its form of a hoard, in its metallic state; in the form in which it is not merely a form of value, but value itself, whose money-form it is. Although this gold now represents capital, both for the Bank and the exporting gold-dealer, i.e., banking or commercial capital, the demand for it is not for capital, but for the absolute form of money-capital. This demand arises precisely at the moment when foreign markets are overcrowded with unsaleable English commodity-capital. What is wanted, therefore, is capital, not as capital, but capital as money, in the form in which money serves as a universal world-market commodity; and this is its original form of precious metal. The drain of gold is not, therefore, as Fullarton, Tooke, etc., claim, "a mere question of capital." Rather, it is a "question of money," even if in a specific function. The fact that it is not a question of inland circulation as the advocates of the Currency Theory maintain, does not prove at all, as Fullarton and others think, that it is merely a question of capital. It is a question of money in the form in which money is an international means of payment.