Every student of accounting experiences difficulty in seeing any principle on which impersonal accounts are debited and credited. At the outset, he wonders why Cash should be debited when money is received, and credited when money is paid out; and, as the other impersonal accounts are taken up, his difficulty increases. Various explanations for the debit and credit of impersonal accounts have been given. None of them ever seemed to the writer satisfactory. After long and careful consideration of the subject, he submits the explanation contained in the following pages as the correct one.