Page:Gold, Prices and Wages.djvu/12

vi solution that I entered it. Nor do I claim to have reached one. But the confident assertion of some economists and business men that the problem was in reality a quite simple one, the rise of prices being evidently due to the enlarged output of gold in recent years, had never seemed satisfactory to me. I therefore decided to try to work out the problem afresh, testing the chain of causation connecting gold with prices, and bringing under survey certain other industrial and financial factors which seemed relevant to the issue.

Accepting at the outset the self-evident proposition that a rise of prices means ah increase in the quantity of money paid for goods greater than the increase in the quantity of goods, I divided my inquiry into two sections. The first section concerned itself with possible causes of the acceleration of the supply of money: the second with possible causes of the retardation of the supply of goods. For a rise of prices may evidently be brought about in either of these two ways, or in both.

My investigation into the supply of money confirms the view that an acceleration of