little bureaus and help to make some one's
fortune, not your own. This would not be of much importance for
Austria if the people one met waiting in these banks were mostly
American, British, French. The sad fact is that the people who are
changing their money thus are nearly all Austrian or at least
ex-Austrian subjects. The old Austrian empire has been divided into
five parts, and each part has a different money which has to be
exchanged whenever you come into another part. And there is a great
difference in the values of the various moneys. Thus the Hungarian
money is worth more than double that of Austria. The twenty, the
hundred, the thousand-crown notes are almost identical in appearance
and printing--a small imprint of a rubber stamp being in many cases the
only distinguishing mark--but even from a waiter in a hotel you can get
two thousand Austrian crowns for one thousand Hungarian ones.
Roumanian lei are also much the same in appearance. Czech crowns and
Serbo-Croat crowns are certainly different. But when your home is in
Czecho-Slovakia and your place of business in Austria, and your aged
father and mother in Hungary and your uncles and cousins in Croatia,
you have a lively time with your money. And it plays prodigiously into
the hands of those who have started changing-shops upon the public ways.

An interest in the rate of exchange has developed among the masses of
the people, who turn to the financial column of the morning paper as
Westerners do to football news or baseball results. There is
considerable fluctuation in the values, and it is no doubt possible to
make a living by speculation alone, and many people do so. In the
banks are, therefore, crowds, both of speculators and of people who
have just crossed the frontier and must get their money changed.

The Financial Committee of the League of Nations issuing its report in
June foreshadowed the substitution at an early date of a new currency
of definite value in gold. The Austrian crowns which are now in use
will then suddenly appear in a new light to the deluded Austrian
masses. They are probably worth nothing at all, and those who have
become rich in them will prove to be rich in nothing. If, however, the
peasant is paid for his wheat in the new gold-backed currency he will
quickly go ahead in wealth. But if he is paid in gold value, how the
cities will starve with their paper!

Between the money-changers in the great streets are the