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the meantime the disorganization of our monetary system had given a new chance to those who had, in days before the war, charged it with lack of elasticity and thought it should now be rebuilt on a new plan. These schemes of reform ranged, as will be shown, from a remodelling of our system according to the pattern devised in Germany and copied in America, to proposals which were based on visions too vague and shadowy to be grasped by an ordinary mind. To sucha mind it would naturally seem that the machinery of business had already been turned upside down quite far enough and that there was no need to make confusion worse confounded by monetary changes the results of which might be surprising to their authors; but it must be remembered that towards the end of the war there was still a very general hope that peace would bring with it a new world, which would be more comfortably arranged for all its members than the one