and currency, with an orgy of extravagance and speculation and consumption of the goods and securities of other countries, ending in adverse exchanges and exports of gold.
This natural solution of the question being too exciting a "proposition" for the nerves of the Federal Reserve Board, America has had to sit on an enormous mountain of gold while its financial rulers have done their best to prevent it producing the economic results which its presence would naturally have worked. Their task would evidently have been made much more difficult if gold had begun to come from England at the rate of 8 or 10 millions a week; and it is certainly possible that in any case, if England had shown a sufficiently stiffnecked determination to pursue the policy of allowing gold to go, the result might have been a working agreement between ourselves and America by which exchange equilibrium between the two countries would have been maintained at a point which would have prevented a continuance of the drain of gold.
There is, as least, something to be said for the view that the Government, rather than hauling down its colours on the matter of the gold standard much sooner than it need have done, might have tried a bluff and let a certain amount of gold go, and waited to
