We have scarcely realised how far our thoughts have travelled during the past five years. But to re-read the famous Cunliffe Report on Currency and Foreign Exchange after the War, published in 1918, brings vividly before one’s mind what a great distance we have covered since then. This document was published three months before the Armistice. It was compiled long before the unpegging of sterling and the great break in the European exchanges in 1919, before the tremendous boom and crash of 1920–21, before the vast piling up of the world’s gold in America, and without experience of the Federal Reserve policy in 1922–23 of burying this gold at Washington, withdrawing it from the exercise of its full effect on prices, and thereby, in effect, demonetising the metal. The Cunliffe Report is an unadulterated pre-war prescription--inevitably so considering that it was written after four years’ interregnum of war, before Peace was in sight, and without knowledge of the revolutionary and unforeseeable experiences of the past five years. Of all the omissions from the Cunliffe Report the most noteworthy is the complete absence of any mention of the problem of the stability of the price-level; and it cheerfully explains how the pre-war system, which it aims at restoring, operated to bring back equilibrium by deliberately causing a “consequent slackening of employment.” The Cunliffe Report belongs to an extinct and an almost forgotten order of ideas. Few think on these lines now; yet the Report remains the authorised declaration of our policy, and the Bank of England and the Treasury are said still to regard it as their marching orders.