The issue of bank notes as a mode of lending a bank's credit calls for consideration here.

Yet it must be observed at once that comparatively few banks in the world have now the legal right to issue their own notes.

In some cases the right has been granted as a monopoly to certain banks in return for specified payments and services.

But in general the function of bank note issue has come to be treated as so closely connected with that of the coinage and regulation of the standard money that it has been increasingly limited in each country to a central national bank, or group of banks, which is in many respects practically if not technically an organ of the government.

This public nature of bank note issues has been strikingly evident in Russia, England, France, Germany, and other countries since the outbreak of the war in 1914.
No two countries have quite the same system and kind of bank notes.
It is well to consider first, therefore, the qualities of typical bank money.