But it looks as though the problem of how to get our money back on this mountain of liable metal, or noble mountain of metal, is going to turn out, after the war, to be very much like the problem we worried through in the 1920's, of how to collect the war debt. We never did collect it, and we finally had to take the loss.
The real trouble seems to be that gold was never cut out for a good currency except in rough and disorderly times, like the middle ages, where its extraordinary boardability was really a virtue. When capitalism came along with its credit struc-nobody knew any better than to make the structure of promises a structure of golden promises, and this boardability of gold became a curse, every fifteen or 20 years.
Few people really wanted to hoard it, but everybody knew that in a pinch, it couldn't be turned out like iron or copper, and that society had made a whale of a lot Promises to produce the one thing that couldn't be produced in a pinch. So people figured they better hurry and get their gold before the other fellow asked for his.
And another thing. In the day of doubt they always rushed their gold from the doubtful spots to the safe spots. First it used to go from the weak goldsmiths to the strong; then from the shaky banks to the reliable; then from the uncertain cities to the safe ones: and then from the doubtful
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.