In chapter 36 we have reached the tentative conclusion that, subject to certain safeguards and compromises for securing a reasonable measure of domestic autonomy, the ideal currency of the immediate future should probably conform to an international standard.

If this be granted, then there are great and obvious advantages in retaining gold as our international standard, provided, as we have previously expressed it, that we can retain the metal as a constitutional monarch, wholly subject to the will of a cabinet of central banks who would hold the sovereign power. For by this means we shall—though at some expense, measured by the annual cost of mining monetary gold—give confidence to the timid and perhaps accelerate the adoption of scientific methods by several decades.

The ultimate problem before us is, therefore, the evolution of a means of managing the value of gold itself through the agency of some kind of supernational institution.

In an earlier draft of this chapter, prepared in June 1929, I had written that, if the falling tendency of wholesale index numbers were to be continued much further, the evil would reach the dimensions of a catastrophe. It is horrible, I continued, to contemplate the waste of wealth and retardation of progress which it is fair to attribute already to the muddle, confusion and division of purpose with which the central banks of the world have conducted their common affairs in the years which have passed since the resolutions of the Genoa Conference of 1922 voiced the reasonable fears and wise counsels of the most prudent opinion in Europe.