One single country--Czechoslovakia--has made the experiment on a modest but sufficient scale. Comparatively free from the burden of internal debt, and free also from serious budgetary deficits, Czechoslovakia was able in the course of 1922, in pursuance of the policy of her Finance Minister, Dr. Alois Rasin, to employ the proceeds of certain foreign loans to improve the exchange value of the Czech crown to nearly three times the rate which had been touched in the previous year. The policy has cost her an industrial crisis and serious unemployment. To what purpose? I do not know. Even now the Czech crown is not worth a sixth of its pre-war parity; and it remains unstabilised, fluttering before the breath of the seasons and the wind of politics. Is, therefore, the process of appreciation to continue indefinitely? If not, when and at what point is stabilisation to be effected? Czechoslovakia was better placed than any country in Europe to establish her economic life on the basis of a sound and fixed currency. Her finances were in equilibrium, her credit good, her foreign resources adequate, and no one could have blamed her for devaluating the crown, ruined by no fault of hers and inherited from the Habsburg Empire. Pursuing a misguided policy in a spirit of stern virtue, she preferred the stagnation of her industries and a still fluctuating standard.[41] [41] I cannot criticise the work, in his second term of office (1922), of Dr. Rasin, now fallen by the hand of an assassin, without reference to his great achievement during his first term (1919) in rescuing his country’s currency from the surrounding chaos. The stamping of the Austrian notes and the levy on holders of titles to money which accompanied it was the only drastic, courageous, and successful measure of finance carried through anywhere in Europe at that epoch; the story of it from Dr. Rasin’s own pen can be read in his _The Financial Policy of Czecho-Slovakia_. Before he had finished other influences became dominant. But, when in 1922 this austere and disinterested Minister returned to office, he missed, in my judgment, his opportunity. He could have completed his task by establishing the currency on a fixed and stable basis, instead of which he used his great authority to disorder trade by a futile process of Deflation. * * * * * If the restoration of many European currencies to their pre-war parity with gold is neither desirable nor possible, what are the forces or the arguments which have established this undesirable impossibility as the avowed policy of most of them? The following are the most important: