In the middle of 1922 I estimated, very roughly, that the German Government had then been obtaining for some time past the equivalent of something between £75,000,000 and £100,000,000 per annum by means of printing money. Up to that time, however, a substantial proportion of these receipts had been contributed through the purchase of mark-notes by speculative foreigners. Nevertheless the German public itself had probably paid upwards of £50,000,000 per annum in this form of taxation. Since the German note issue was still worth £240,000,000 so lately as December 1920 (see the table on p. 51) and had not fallen below £100,000,000 even in the middle of 1922, the rate of depreciation represented by the above, whilst sufficiently disastrous to the mark as a store of value or as a unit of account, had been by no means prohibitive to its continued use in daily life. In the latter half of 1922, however, the public learnt to make enough further economies in the use of the mark as money to reduce the value of the total note issue to about £60,000,000. The first effect of the Ruhr occupation was, as we have seen above (p. 54), to bring down the note issue below the minimum to which the public could adjust their habits, which resulted in the temporary recovery of March 1923. Nevertheless by the middle of 1923 the public was able to get along with a note issue worth about £20,000,000. All this time the German Government had continued to raise resources equivalent to round about £1,000,000 a week by note-printing--which meant a depreciation of 5 per cent a week even if the public had been unable to reduce any further the value of the aggregate note issue, and came in practice to about 10 per cent a week allowing for their yet further economies in the use of mark-currency. But the expenses of the Ruhr resistance, coupled with the complete breakdown of other sources of taxation, had led, by May and June 1923, to the Government’s raising the equivalent of, first, £2,000,000 and then £3,000,000 a week by note-printing. On a note issue, of which the total value had sunk by that time to about £20,000,000, this was pushing inflationary taxation to a preposterous and suicidal point. The social disorganisation, resulting from a rapid movement to do without the mark altogether, quickly resulted in Dr. Cuno’s fall.[16] The climax was reached when, in Dr. Cuno’s last days, the Government doubled the note issue in a week and raised the equivalent of £3,000,000 in that period out of a note issue worth about £4,000,000 altogether,--a performance far transcending the wildest extravagances of the Soviet.