Page:Bankers and Credit (1924).pdf/277

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pace of development and production in different industries, and spread to others like an unwholesome contagion.

If this be so, the notion that we can secure real stability in enterprise and freedom from unemployment, even if stabilization of the general price level were entirely successful, might bring with it grave disappointment.

Champions of stabilization are already arising who go all the way with Professor Cassel and Mr. Hawtrey but insist that when their goal is achieved it must only be a first step towards the stabilization of individual prices. Mr. E. M. H. Lloyd has lately produced a book entitled Stabilization, an Economic Policy for Producers and Consumers, which is all that a book should be in brevity and clearness and brightness. He is very eager and earnest, thinks private property in land and railways an "anachronism," and takes things for granted with an airy confidence that is very pleasant; as Mr. Edmund Gosse once said of a French theorist about Shakespeare, "he leaps to conclusions with the sudden agility of a chamois." He seems to think that because thirty-one Governments assembled at the Genoa Conference have officially endorsed the "important new doctrine, that the general level of prices, and consequently the general