only not to ask for gold, but to pay all of its gold into the banks, and did so to a great extent. Anybody who had gone to the Bank of England with a £1,000,000 worth of Treasury notes or Bank of England notes would have found very great difficulty indeed in turning them into sovereigns and would probably never have succeeded in doing so. If he had, he would have had still more difficulty in sending the gold abroad. In the first place he would have known that even to attempt to do so would have marked him as a suspected person. In the second, the cost of doing so was so great, thanks to the activities of Admiral Tirpitz and his submarines, which made the risk very expensive to insure, that it would not have been worth his while at the rates of exchange which were current during the war and were officially maintained by borrowing operations carried out for that purpose. Though convertibility and the gold standard were thus ostensibly and officially maintained they did not count as part of the practical problem. There was thus no reason why the Bank of England should not multiply the figures in its books to any extent that was required of it, by increasing its holding of securities on one side of its Banking Depart-
