William Bramley/The Gods of Eden/23/229

already as high as they could reasonably go and so the House of Commons felt that it had no alternative but to institute the scheme. The Bank of England was thereby born and warfare could continue, just as war could continue in Holland after the Bank of Amsterdam had been created there.

The Bank of England has been labeled by some economists the "Mother of Central Banks." It became the model for all central banks which followed it, including the central banks of today. Under the Bank of England scheme, the central bank was to be the nation's primary bank, and it would lend exclusively to the national government. The central bank's entire purpose was to put the government into debt and to be the government's major creditor. The central bank's notes would be lent to the government and those notes would then circulate as a national currency. This would cause the nation and its people to rely on those notes as money. The establishment of the Bank of England caused Britain to go deeply into debt to a monetary elite (the "paper aristocracy") which could then influence the use of the nation's resources. This is the modus operandi of every central bank today.

Like most modern central banks, the Bank of England was a privately-owned or privately-operated bank with quasi-governmental status. In accordance with Paterson's plan, the financiers who pooled their resources to create the Bank of England received approval from the government to issue gold and silver notes in a quantity many times exceeding the financiers' pooled holdings. The standard practice of bankers during that period was to issue notes four to five times in excess of their precious metals. The Bank of England, however, issued an incredible multiplication of 16 2/3. The British government agreed to borrow those notes and honor them as legal money for use in its purchases. The government accepted this plan because the government was not required to repay the initial loan, only the interest on the loan. Would not the Bank of England lose money on such a deal?

Not at all.

The face value of the loan notes were many times in excess of the value of the actual assets on which the notes were based. The interest on the loan in just one year surpassed the total value of the precious metals of