by easy stages to 3 per cent., which it reached in July 1922. Prices of commodities reached their highest point in March 1920 and then fell with unparalleled quickness, but gradually slackening pace, until September 1922. The decline, during the last eighteen months of its course, was thus accompanied by a fall in Bank Rate from 7 per cent. to 3 per cent. Bank deposits in the United Kingdom—the nearest approach that we have to a test of the extent of credit—stood at £1,032,000,000 at the end of 1913, according to the Economist's tables, and were £1,988,000,000 in 1918, £2,356,000,000 in 1919, and continued to expand until the end of 1921 when they stood at £2,527,000,000 utterly refusing to obey the behest of Bank Rate and contract when it went up. Contraction happened in 1922, when they came down to £2,362,000,000. And this was the year when they were being urged to expand by Bank Rate, which came down from 5 per cent. to 3 per cent. Surely these facts and figures looked at together make it most difficult to believe that prices and credit, industry and enterprise are merely "a pipe for Bank Rate's finger to sound what stop she please."
Nevertheless, in trying to show that the United States Federal Reserve Board and the Bank of England and the British Treasury
