ill wealth, but it is no longer
capital because it has ceased to produce good food and is merely a
pleasant lounging-place for his lordship. May not the failure of
production be partly due to the fact that, owing to the extravagant
and stupid expenditure of so many of the rich, too much work is put
into providing luxuries--of which the above-mentioned deer-park is an
example--and too little into the equipment of industry with the plant
that it needs for its due expansion?

Mr Kitson's answer is much easier. According to him, instead of
working better, organising better, and putting more of our output into
plant and equipment and less into self-indulgence and vulgarity all
that we have to do to work the necessary reform is to provide more
money and credit. Since, he says, under the industrial era--

"All goods were made primarily for exchange or rather for sale ... it
followed, therefore, that production could only continue so long as
sales could be effected; and since sales were limited by the amount of
money or credit offered, it followed that production was necessarily
limited by the quantity of money or credit available for commercial
purposes."

But is this so? If goods are produced more rapidly than money, it does
not follow that they could not be sold, but only that they would have
been sold for less money. The producer would have made a smaller
profit, but on the other hand the cheapening of the product would have
improved the position of the consumer, the cheapening of materials
would have benefited the manufacturer, and it is just possible that
production, instead of being limited, might have been stimulated by
cheapness due to scarcity of currency and credit, or, at least, might
have gone on just as well on a lower all-round level of prices. On the
whole, it is perhaps more probable that a steady rise in prices caused
by a gradual increase in the volume of currency and credit would have
the more beneficial effect in stimulating the energies of producers.
But Mr Kitson's argument that the volume of currency and credit
imposes an absolute limit on the volume of production is surely much
too clean-cut an assumption. This absolute limit may be true, if
currency cannot be increased, with regard to the aggregate value in
money of the goods produced. But money value and volume are two quite
different things. If our credit system had not been developed as it
has, and we had had to rely on actual gold and silver for