Finished and delivered by the end of August 1923, the foregoing chapters, for very good reasons over which the writer had no control, went into cold storage for four months. Usually, cold storage has an even worse effect on the freshness of financial script than on that of chilled beef. But in this case the delay in publication brought with it several advantages. It enables me to record certain interesting developments in the stabilization theory and to show that, at least in one instance, the plea for stabilization looks very like our old friend inflation in disguise; and to refer, though briefly and after necessarily inadequate study, to Mr. Keynes's Tract on Monetary Reform published by Messrs. Macmillan early in December. And above all, the intervening period has provided a most timely and striking example of the effect on the minds of men, both at home and abroad and perhaps more especially
