Taking a world-wide view, the money in circulation in the world outside of Russia has increased during the war from fifteen billions to forty-five billions and the bank deposits in fifteen principal countries from twenty-seven billions to seventy-five billions. That is both money and deposits have trebled; and prices, on the average have perhaps trebled also. The Bolsheviki are a law unto themselves. They have issued eighty billion dollars of paper money, or more than in all the rest of the world put together. Consequently prices in Russia have doubtless reached the sky, though no exact measure of them, since the Bolshevist régime, is at hand. The increase of over thirty billions in the money of the world (outside of Russia) is as Austin says "more, _in its face value_, than all the gold and all the silver turned out by all the mines of all the world in 427 years since the discovery of America." The conclusion toward which the foregoing and other arguments lead is that, in this war as in general in the past, the great outstanding disturber of the price level has always been money. If this is the case, how fruitless, except as treatments of symptoms, are price-fixing, or campaigns aimed at profiteers! The cry of profiteering may hinder a real solution of the difficulty by diverting attention from the real issue and fanning and giving up an object to the spirit of revolt. Money is so much an accepted convenience in practice that it has become a great stumbling block in theory. Since we talk always in terms of money and live in a money atmosphere, as it were, we become as unconscious of it as we do of the air we breathe. ASSOCIATE EVILS OF HIGH PRICES We have now considered the cost of living situation under the two questions "What is it?" and "Why is it?" The third question, "What of it?"--_i. e._, what are the evils connected with it--is more easily answered today, when it comes home to all of us, that it might have been 10 years ago. If, for each one of us, the rise of income were to keep up exactly with the rise in cost of living, then the high cost of living would have no terrors; it would be merely on paper. But no such perfect adjustment ever occurs or can occur. Outstanding contracts and understandings in terms of money make this out of the question. The salaried men and the wage earners suffer--that is, the cost is borne by those with relatively "fixed" incomes.