had, in raising rates, done something which was largely ineffective, very costly and rather futile, we are much kinder to them than the critics who think that Bank Rate is in fact all powerful and that it was the main cause of the after-war gamble by not having been put up, and of the subsequent depression by not having been put down again. In February 1922 a paper was read before the Royal Statistical Society by Mr. R. G. Hawtrey, distinguished even among the brilliant band of our Treasury officials by reason of his eminent abilities which he has applied to the elucidation of monetary problems in works which are classics as soon as they are published. His paper was headed "The Federal Reserve System of the United States" and has now been republished in a volume entitled Monetary Reconstruction. It was an attack, suave and courteous, but almost impassioned in its earnestness, on the handling of the monetary situation by the Federal Reserve system. He charges it with having tried to cope, in 1919, with a menacing situation by tentative and hesitating steps, and though he thinks that the raising of its rediscount rate to 7 per cent. in June 1920 was at last successful and turned the tide, yet "the ebb had to be proportioned to the flow. In so far as the expansion had got out of hand, the
