s 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now clearly as out of date as the censorship, which, like it,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 stopped forthwith, and that if it were
necessary to provide more currency it would be better for the banks
to be allowed to issue notes themselves. This suggestion involves, of
course, a complete reversal of the principles on which our monetary
system has grown up, since it has long been based on a note-issuing
monopoly in the hands of the Bank of England. But these are
topsy-turvy days, in which greyheaded prece