the amount of debt redeemed was greater than the sum produced by the sale of war assets, and then only by accident. For that was the year in which Sir Robert Horne played a glorious farce with the nation's finances by first proposing, in order to reduce taxation, to pay off debt with borrowed money, and then being smothered by a surplus of £120,000,000, owing to enormous errors in estimating for which he, of course, was not responsible.
But whether the Government paid its way out of revenue, or by selling capital assets, the fact remains that after the end of 1919 it followed the sound doctrine of the Cunliffe Committee and committed no further borrowings, and indeed redeemed debt rapidly. The result was that there was no more expansion of currency and credit due to loans from banks to the Government or to customers wha borrowed money to lend to the Government. A certain amount of temporary inflation happened from time to time, especially at dates when very large interest payments had to be made, because the Treasury, being unable to finance its needs out of ordinary receipts or by the sale of Treasury Bills, had to raise money by Ways and Means advances from the Bank of England, so producing an extra supply of "cash at the Bank of England" for other
