at first, to stop inflation by means of international intervention. "I requested," he writes (page 26), "the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Dr. Edward Benes, who was then staying in Paris in connexion with the settlement of the Armistice conditions, to endeavour to have an International Commission appointed to control the German Imperial and Austro-Hungarian Banks, whose duty should consist in the prevention of the issue of bank notes not covered by private liability in order to put a stop to the inflation. . . . This idea of international intervention came to nothing, either because the nations with sound currencies could not imagine the terrible conditions of a paper currency inflation and its disastrous consequences, or because they were not in the humour to champion the rights of the conquered."
Dr. Rasin must surely have written the passage about nations with sound currencies with a gently malicious intention. At the time of the Armistice it would have been difficult to find a country whose currency had not been debased during the war, and most of the Entente Powers, if they had understood the Czecho Slovakian proposal, would have hesitated to enforce on the conquered Governments a financial ideal which they saw no chance of
