t. interest, and repayment in 30 years' time, begins to be very
seriously interested in the question of what command over commodities
his annual income of 5 per cent. will give him, and whether the
repayment of his money at the end of 30 years will represent the
repayment of anything like the same amount of buying power as his
money now possesses. It is here, of course, that gold has failed
because, as we have seen, the process has been a fairly steady one of
depreciation in the buying power of the alleged standard and a rise in
the prices of other commodities. This means to say that the investor
who has accepted repayment at the end of 30 years of the amount that
he lent, be it L100 or L10,000, has found that the money repaid to him
had by no means the same buying power as the money which he originally
invested.

Within limits this tendency of the standard of value towards
depreciation has possessed considerable advantages, probably much
greater advantages than would have followed from the contrary process
if it had been the other way round. If we can imagine that the
currency history of the world had been such that a constantly
diminished quantity of currency in relation to the output of other
commodities had caused a steady fall in prices, it is obvious that
there might have been a very considerable check to the enthusiasm of
industry. It has indeed been contended that the scarcity of precious
metals which, with the absence of an organised credit system, produced
this result during the later Roman Empire was a very important cause
of the decay into which that Empire fell. I do not feel at all
convinced that this effect would necessarily have followed the cause.
It seems to me that the ingenuity of enterprising man is such that the
producer might, and probably would, have found means for facing the
probability of depreciation in price. But it is always an empty
pastime to try to imagine what would have happened "if things had
been otherwise." What we do know is that a period of rising prices,
especially if the rise does not go too fast, stimulates the enterprise
of producers, and sets business going actively, and consequently it
may at least be claimed that the failure of the gold standard to
maintain that steadiness of value which is an obvious attribute of
the ideal standard has at least been a failure on the right side, by
tending to depreciation of the value of currency, and so to a rise of
the prices of other co