the situation by the good old banking rule for meeting a drain—that is by saying, with a stiff upper lip and an air of calm confidence, "Take your money as fast as you like." It is usually said that if we had attempted to do this all our gold would have immediately left the country and gone over to America; but this is by no means certain. In the first place it could not all have gone at once because even without the submarine danger there are very decided limits to the possibility of insuring gold shipments against ordinary marine risks. It is not possible to dogmatize about this because to a certain extent it is a question of the price that will be paid. I am told by those who ought to know that any shipment of more than £4,000,000 of gold in one bottom would have been very difficult to underwrite in the ordinary course of business in London and other centres, and that the insurance of such a shipment would only have been even considered on a first class liner, of which probably not more than two, and sometimes not so many, would have left a possible port of shipment during a week. Thus the process of draining away our gold supply, which stood at the end of the war at about £150,000,000, would necessarily have been slow. If we had shown that we had meant to allow it, it would certainly have been
