Mr Kitson’s answer is much easier.  According to him, instead of working better, organising better, and putting more of our output into plant and equipment and less into self-indulgence and vulgarity all that we have to do to work the necessary reform is to provide more money and credit.  Since, he says, under the industrial era—­

“All goods were made primarily for exchange or rather for sale ... it followed, therefore, that production could only continue so long as sales could be effected; and since sales were limited by the amount of money or credit offered, it followed that production was necessarily limited by the quantity of money or credit available for commercial purposes.”

But is this so?  If goods are produced more rapidly than money, it does not follow that they could not be sold, but only that they would have been sold for less money.  The producer would have made a smaller profit, but on the other hand the cheapening of the product would have improved the position of the consumer, the cheapening of materials would have benefited the manufacturer, and it is just possible that production, instead of being limited, might have been stimulated by cheapness due to scarcity of currency and credit, or, at least, might have gone on just as well on a lower all-round level of prices.  On the whole, it is perhaps more probable that a steady rise in prices caused by a gradual increase in the volume of currency and credit would have the more beneficial effect in stimulating the energies of producers.  But Mr Kitson’s argument that the volume of currency and credit imposes an absolute limit on the volume of production is surely much too clean-cut an assumption.  This absolute limit may be true, if currency cannot be increased, with regard to the aggregate value in money of the goods produced.  But money value and volume are two quite different things.  If our credit system had not been developed as it has, and we had had to rely on actual gold and silver for carrying on all production and trade, it does not by any means follow that trade and production might not have been on something like their present scale in the matter of volume and turnover; but the money value would have been much smaller because prices would have been all round at a much, lower level.

This contention is based on what is called the “Quantity Theory of Money.”  This theory Mr Kitson wholeheartedly believes, so that this is not a point that has to be argued with him.  “The value of money,” he says, “as every student of economics knows, is determined by the quantity of money in use and its velocity of circulation.”  Quite so.  If you increase the amount of money faster than that of goods, more money has to be given for less goods; the value, or buying power, of money is depreciated and prices go up.  The present war has given an excellent example of this process at work.  All the warring Governments have printed acres of paper money, and have worked the credit system