The continuous fluctuation in the supply of money which grew out of such variations in public revenue was bad enough in its way and undoubtedly contributed in an important degree to the regular annual stringencies which in former years were a feature of American banking. These, however, were not to be compared in their injurious effect with the evils of the working of the independent treasury system in time of war. As is well known, the great financial demands of governments in times of modern war invariably strain the financial mechanism to its utmost, and it may often be true that a single loan amounts to more than the entire supply of money in a country. This was true of one or more loans both in the United States and in Great Britain during the World War, when upward of $5,000,000,000 was subscribed as the result of a single offering. Any effort to collect great sums in actual coin is necessarily disastrous, because it exhausts the cash reserves of the banks and thereby drives them into a condition of suspension. At the time of the Civil War the cost of hostilities was not nearly so large, relatively or absolutely, as it became fifty years later, but the size of the loans was sufficient. to compel bank suspension as a result of the effort to collect the subscriptions in cash. In fact, the independent treasury system had to be practically laid aside during the four years of the Civil War, so disastrous was its working, and after the war it had to be seriously modified in practical use by permitting the deposit of inactive funds in national banks protected by deposits of government bonds with the Treasury. This plan, however, was never satisfactory; and when the Federal Reserve Act was adopted provision was made for constituting the Federal Reserve banks agents of the government. The coming on of the European War, and later our own participation in it, compelled the Secretary of the Treasury to avail himself of the means thus held out to him for modernizing the system of the government and for putting the Treasury's relations with banks upon a business basis. In this respect, the practice of the United States is to-day practically in harmony with that of the chief European countries.