Books on Money

What Is Money? (Victor S. Clark, Houghton Mifflin, $1.00) is a little exposition of a big subject in which the author has undertaken to answer briefly—rather too briefly, perhaps—some of the numerous questions about money which are put to him as Consultant in Economies in the Library of Congress. The booklet is a knothole to monetary history through which one sees modernity featheredge off into antiquity; hears the Frogs of Aristophanes croak about Gresham’s law. The author’s temperature is about normal, but judging from the little barbs he shoots one suspects that he might run a fever. He is not happy. The ghosts of the forerunners of past inflationary troubles look too much like the realities he sees here and now. But with it all he is good-natured and not as set in his ways as poor Pudd’nhead Wilson’s cat, who, having sat down on a red-hot stove cap, would never thereafter sit down tin any kind of stove eap anywhere.

Another book along the same line, but with an English flavor, is Money: Gold, Silver, Paper (Francis

W. Hirst, Scribners, $1.75). It fills in some of the crannies left by Dr. Clark.

This is no mere tract of the times, no pamphlet of propaganda. It is pretty strong, but it is not over the head of the layman who has an interest in public questions. The author sets out to write a popular and critical history of money from the earliest times down to the present year. He succeeds, and mainly because be does not take his economics too seriously. As a former editor of the London Economist he knows that economics is not chemistry and never can be. He eschews mathematical formulæ, the technical vocabulary of the classroom, and uses language intelligible to all who know English.

Only such facts are given as are needed for revealing the world’s monetary misery and for suggesting that the gold-soaked countries might well part with some of their hoard in exchange for silver and then make both metals their monetary base.

These two books are a good starter for those who plan a foray into what has happened in the United States since March 1933.