see what happened. We might possibly have held the gold standard and been brought back, much sooner than we were, to sanity in money matters. As it was, we kept our gold and lost our gold standard definitely though temporarily, when the export of gold was forbidden. At the same time an arrangement by which the output of the South African mines had been taken over by the Bank of England at the mint price was dropped and the market was freed for any gold, for the export of which a licence could be obtained. The consequence of this has been that the gold from the South African mines has gone regularly week by week to New York, except on rare occasions when a demand on account of India or China has diverted a fragment.
Less important changes in the working of the Money Market were the dropping in May 1919 of the system by which the Bank of England borrowed from the Clearing and other banks their surplus cash balances, and later in the same year, in October, the special rate given for foreign money was also dropped. This was a war time measure which could not possibly have been continued into peace. In war time the censorship of telegrams and letters made it more or less possible to trace the actual purpose of financial transactions, and to see that
