For certain other purposes, however, to which money is put in a modern community, the inflationary tax becomes prohibitive at a much earlier stage. As a store of value, for example, money is rapidly discarded, as soon as further depreciation is confidently anticipated. As a unit of account, for contracts and for balance sheets, it quickly becomes worse than useless, although for such purposes the privilege of the current money as legal-tender for the discharge of debts stands in the way of its being discarded as soon as it ought to be. In the last phase, when the use of the legal-tender money has been discarded for all purposes except trifling out-of-pocket expenditure, inflationary taxation has at last defeated itself. For in that case the total value of the note issue, which is sufficient to meet the public’s minimum requirements, amounts to a figure relatively so trifling that the amount of resources which the government can hope to raise by yet further inflation--without pushing it to a point at which the money will be discarded even for out-of-pocket trifles--is correspondingly small. Thus at last, unless it is employed with some measure of moderation, this potent instrument of governmental exaction breaks in the hands of those that use it, and leaves them at the same time with the rest of their fiscal system in total ruins;--out of which, in the ebb and flow of the economic life of nations, may emerge once more a reformed and admirable system. The chervonetz of Moscow and the krone of Vienna are already stabler units than the franc or the lira. All these matters can be illustrated from the recent experiences of Germany, Austria, and Russia. The following tables show the gold value of the note issues of these countries at various dates: +----------------+-----------------+----------------+-----------------+ | | Volume of Note | Number of | Value of Note | | GERMANY. |Issue in Milliard| Paper Marks |Issue in Milliard| | | Paper Marks. | = 1 Gold Mark. | Gold Marks. | +----------------+-----------------+----------------+-----------------+ | December 1920 | 81 | 17 | 4·8 | | December 1921 | 122 | 46 | 2·7 | | March 1922 | 140 | 65 | 2·2 | | June 1922 | 180 | 90 | 2·0 | | September 1922 | 331 | 349 | 0·9 | | December 1922 | 1,293 | 1,778 | 0·7 | | February 1923 | 2,266 | 11,200 | 0·2 | | March 1923 | 4,956 | 4,950 | 1·0 | | June 1923 | 17,000 | 45,000 | 0·4 | | August 1923 | 116,000 | 1,000,000 | 0·116 | +----------------+-----------------+----------------+-----------------+