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 Under these arrangements, if carried to their logical conclusion, the task of those who have to maintain the country's gold reserve, on the assumption that a gold reserve is a necessary basis of a monetary system, would be extremely difficult. In one of its exuberant moods the commercial community could demand the creation of fresh currency as fast as it liked, continually forcing up prices, and so putting further nominal profits into its pocket as the process continued. The question of the effect of such a development on the foreign exchanges is a consideration which any individual producer might consider less important than the maintenance of activity and rising prices which were making his profits look so comfortable, and enabling him to make everybody happy by maintaining and increasing the employment that he was giving. The arguments for a Paradise based on unlimited credit expansion are extremely attractive, as long as one does not look at the end of them. The end, when the system is worked to its logical conclusion, has been shown in Russia, and other countries where the currency has become practically worthless.

As it happened, at the very time when Sir Edward was making this attack upon the old system on which the country's monetary