wn of currency, and the distrust in its purchasing
value, is an aggravation of these evils which must be discussed in a
little more detail in connection with foreign trade.

What then is our picture of Europe? A country population able to support
life on the fruits of its own agricultural production but without the
accustomed surplus for the towns, and also (as a result of the lack of
imported materials and so of variety and amount in the saleable
manufactures of the towns) without the usual incentives to market food
in return for other wares; an industrial population unable to keep its
strength for lack of food, unable to earn a livelihood for lack of
materials, and so unable to make good by imports from abroad the failure
of productivity at home. Yet, according to Mr. Hoover, "a rough estimate
would indicate that the population of Europe is at least 100,000,000
greater than can be supported without imports, and must live by the
production and distribution of exports."

The problem of the re-inauguration of the perpetual circle of production
and exchange in foreign trade leads me to a necessary digression on the
currency situation of Europe.

Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the
Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process
of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an
important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not
only confiscate, but they confiscate _arbitrarily_; and, while the
process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this
arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at
confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth. Those
to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even
beyond their expectations or desires, become "profiteers,", who are the
object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has
impoverished, not less than of the proletariat. As the inflation
proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from
month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors,
which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly
disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of
wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.

Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of
overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency.
The proc