beer or anyone else who wants to buy anything is very much the same.  A bit of metal that is called a shilling has about the value of a pre-war sixpence and a bit of paper that is called a Bradbury fetches half as much as the pound of five years ago.  Compared with what other peoples are suffering from the same disease arising from the same surfeit of money in one form or another, this nuisance that we are enduring is not too terribly severe.  It has entailed great hardship on a class that is small in number, namely, those who have to live on fixed incomes.  The salary-earner and the rentier have borne the brunt, while the wage-earner and the profit-maker have been able to expand their earnings, in paper, at least to a point at which the depreciation of currency have left them no worse off.  Seeing that the wage-earners are those who do the dreariest and dirtiest jobs, and that the profit-makers are those who take the risks of industry and the enormous responsibility of organising enterprise, they are the classes whom it is clearly most desirable to encourage.  The rentier in these days gets less than no sympathy, but we make a great mistake if we think that we can with impunity crush him between the upper and nether millstone of fixed income and rising prices.  With his help we have equipped industry at home and abroad.  We can, if we choose, by depreciating the currency still further, lessen still more the reward that we pay him for that benefit.  He may kick, but he cannot abolish the equipment with which he has already provided industry.  But if we make his life too hard he can strike like the rest of us, and by refusing to provide for any further expansion in industrial equipment, he can hold up production until we have devised some new method of laying up capital.  Currency depreciation is good for the debtor and bad for the creditor; if it goes too far it kills the creditor and reduces business to chaos.

We are a very long way from the chaos to which many of our Continental neighbours have already reduced their monetary systems; but there is fortunately a very general feeling that we are a country with a reputation and a prestige on this point; and the business world is growing restive concerning the delay on the part of those responsible in putting an end to a state of things which may have been justified by the war’s exigencies (though there is much to be said for the view that in fact it only added to the war’s difficulties) but is now clearly as out of date as the censorship, which, like it, nevertheless, continues to flourish.  This state of things arises from the arrangement tinder which an unlimited supply of legal tender currency can be manufactured by the Government, which encouraged to continue the system by the fact that each note issued is in effect a loan to itself without interest.  At the meeting of Barclays Bank on January 27th, Mr. Goodenough demanded that the issue of currency notes by the Government should be