absurdity of considering money stable simply because there was no open premium on gold.
It is clear now that, in this effort to avoid the reproaches which followed the Napoleonic and the Civil Wars, there was an exaggerated attention to the form rather than the substance, to the letter rather than the spirit.
Sometimes the anxiety to avoid technical depreciation became a little ridiculous and turned into a desire to conceal rather than prevent; for there was, apparently, in some places and times, an unpublished and unacknowledged premium on gold.[1] Some of the efforts to forbid sales of gold seem now somewhat ostrich-like. It was also a little strange, although there were some valid reasons for the practice, to preserve gold reserves by forbidding their use as reserves. This reminds one of the story of the sea captain whose anxiety to keep an adequate supply of life preservers was so great that he nailed them to the deck and forbade anyone to take them up!
It is now getting to be realized that, in spite of all the laudable efforts to prevent the usual war-time depreciation of money, depreciation did actually occur none the less and in a greater degree than in most previous wars. Lord D'Abernon of England remarked in a recent speech in the House of Lords that the fall in the value of money during the four years of the war had exceeded the fall in two preceding centuries. Similar observations are not uncommon from other influential sources and will, I believe, become increasingly frequent and emphatic. It ought not to be surprising if succeeding generations should criticize the inflationistic financiering of the Great War, especially of the European belligerents, as severely as we criticize that of the Civil War.
- ↑ Although gold sales at a premium were forbidden by Order in Council in England there were illicit sales. On April 24, 1919, for instance, gold was sold at £5 10s although the mint price is £3 17s 9d. The premium on gold was further concealed by the "pegging" of foreign exchanges at government expense. In Russia and Italy the premium on gold was openly admitted. Since the war the premium has been explicit even in England.
