What happened to our monetary system during and after the war, some of the things that a crowd of critics and reformers want to do to it now, and the reasons which seem to me to confirm the opinion of our leading bankers, that the first thing to do is to get back to the gold standard on the pre-war basis, are the subject of this book. It cannot claim to have covered all the suggestions of all the monetary reformers, who have been multiplied almost as fast as money by the efforts of our politicians. All that it can hope to do is to cull a few of the brightest flowers of the criticism that has bloomed so freely, and to put before the lay reader, in language that he can understand, some of the ambitions of those who believe that the economic Paradise is to be won by monetary manipulation. Dryden thought that “no Government has ever been, or ever can be, wherein timeservers and blockheads will not be uppermost.” Without going all this way with him, we may safely contend that the financial achievements of our war Governments do not encourage us to increase official control of the Money Market.