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 reaching for themselves. It is also very doubtful whether such a prohibition could have been carried out effectively. To tell the central bankers of Germany and Austria that they were only to issue more notes when "covered by private liability"—that is, in the supply of advances to private borrowers—would only have stopped note printing on Government account as long as official and financial ingenuity had been unable to find a way round the restriction. But it might possibly have been effective and the difference that it might have made to Europe's history in the past four years is almost incalculable.

But that is another story. In fact there was the inflation in Germany that gave Mr. Kitson the text on which he preached so eloquently as quoted above, in company with a host of other less emphatic and confident exponents of the inflationary gospel. At that time, in 1921, he had a strong case. Unemployment was on an enormous scale both here and in the United States. He was able to quote an American Trade Journal as authority for a statement that "currency contraction had thrown out of employment some 4,000,000, operatives, and in the inflating countries there were few or none out of work." Whether unemployment was caused here and in America by currency