as ever in the hamlets, the
cream overflowed the pails of Cheshire, the apple juice foamed in the
presses of Herefordshire, the piles of crockery glowed in the furnaces
of the Trent, and the barrows of coal rolled fast along the timber
railways of the Tyne. But when the great instrument of exchange became
thoroughly deranged, all trade, all industry, were smitten as with a
palsy.... Nothing could be purchased without a dispute. Over every
counter there was wrangling from morning to night. The workman and his
employer had a quarrel as regularly as the Saturday came round. On a
fair-day or a market-day the clamours, the reproaches, the taunts, the
curses, were incessant; and it was well if no booth was overturned,
and no head broken.... The price of the necessaries of life, of shoes,
of ale, of oatmeal, rose fast. The labourer found that the bit of
metal which, when he received it was called a shilling, would hardly,
when he wanted to purchase a pot of beer or a loaf of rye bread, go as
far as sixpence."

From some of the evils thus dazzlingly described we are happily free
in these times. We are not cursed with a currency composed of coins
which are good, bad and indifferent, with the result that the public
gets the bad and indifferent while the nimble bullion dealers absorb
and export the good. There is nothing to choose between one piece of
paper and another, and all that is wrong with them is that there are
too many of them. But the general result as it affects the labourer
who wants to purchase a pot of 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 risk