"now been deflating our currency very heavily for a number of years. . . . There should surely be some connection between the financial policy of the country and its trade situation. The bad trade of the world was not of our making; inflation in foreign countries we could not control, but our own financial policy we could control. . . . A large number of people were jumping to the conclusion that those who proposed a reconsideration of monetary policy desired to suggest 'inflation.' He rather suspected that most of those who jumped to this conclusion had very little notion of what inflation meant, and he would suggest that they might wait until the Federation had said what it did mean, instead of accusing it wildly of all sorts of things which had never entered its head." (Times, October 24, 1923.)
Next day the Federation said what it did mean in a report addressed to the Government on the subject of unemployment and published in the papers of October 25. It expressed, among many other interesting observations on our economic difficulties, its belief that "the interests of trade and of the country as a whole will be best served by a stable monetary policy which aimed at keeping the price level steady." But this sweet draught of the pure milk of stabilization was spiced, as so often happens,
