ESSAYS IN PERSUASION

PART

246

gold standard is no more responsible for thecondition of affairs in the coal industry than isthe Gulf Stream . These statements are of thefeather-brained order. It is open to Ministersto argue that the restoration of gold is worththe sacrifice and that the sacrifice is temporary.They can also say, with truth, that the industrieswhich are feeling the wind most have privatetroubles of their own. When a general causeoperates, those which are weak for other reasonsare toppled over. But because an epidemic ofinfluenza carries off only those who have weakhearts, it is not permissible to say that the in-fluenza is “all to the good,” or that it has nomore to do with the mortality than the GulfStream has.

The effect has been the more severe becausewe were not free from trouble a year ago.Whilst, at that date, sterling wages and sterlingcost of living were in conformity with values inthe United States, they were already too highcompared with those in some European countries.It was also probable that certain of our exportindustries were overstocked both with plantand with labour, and that some transference ofcapital and of men into home industries wasdesirable and, in the long run, even inevitable.Thus we already had an awkward problem; andone of the arguments against raising the inter-national value of sterling was the fact that itgreatly aggravated, instead of mitigating, anexisting disparity between internal and externalvalues, and that, by committing us to a period