Untitled Book Review

No country has ever yet established a monetary system which either the venality of sovereignty or the folly of subjects did not destroy. In the present upheaval t wo names are typical of opposing camps — Frank A. Vanderlip and James P. Warburg. Mr. Vanderlip’s Tomorrow’s Money (Reynal and Hitchcock, $2.00) is a programme, a personal point of view. ‘We undertook the impossible in the way of giving gold liquidity to all wealth.’ The book pivots on this sentence, italicized on an early page. Old King Midas got himself into a peck of trouble by trying to convert everything into gold and succeeding. We moderns have got ourselves into quite as much by trying to do likewise and failing. Money may be the root of all evil, but we still grub for more of the root.

It is folly, he thinks, to try to shift title to the world’s capital by shunting the world’s gold, which if boxed and stored along Wall Street would hardly slowdown traffic. Gold’s work is the money work involved in clearing international balances and in serving as the base for issuing paper money; why try to make it do more.?

The author would nationalize gold, — this has since been done, — and give a Monetary Authority the sole right of issuing paper money, — this has not been done, — to be used for the purchase from the Federal Reserve banks of eligible commercial paper and shortterm bonds. Much of what the author proposes has become a part of the pattern.

Early last tear Mr. Warburg joined in the fray with The Money Muddle Knopf, $2.00), calling Mr. Vanderlip and other economic sinners to repentance. Interest centres in Part II because of an intimate telling of those forces which played their part in shaping the first year of President Roosevelt’s administration, The curtain is drawn on the day when the Senate ‘lay down and rolled over by a vote of 66 to 23’ and ‘Congress had abdicated’ and ‘the power over money was now solely in the hands of the Executive.’ There is a peculiar human note, nostalgic; one almost hears Rachael weeping for her children. The author went to the London Conference as adviser of the American Delegation, but resigned while there because he felt that an inexplicable change in Washington carried him into waters for which he had no charts. The book oozes with personal loyalty to the President, but criticizes ruthlessly his monetary policies. The solid substance of the book is to be found in Part III, in which are diagnosed our difficulties, which he really thinks are not monetary.

Somewhere Mr. Warburg mentions as an advantage of his opponentthe fact that they had a plan to offer when something had to be done, while he had none. He could n’t beat something with nothing. So last fall he was up and at ’em again; this time calling not only sinners but even the righteous to repentance in It’s Up to Us (Knopf. $2,00) — ‘us’ being all who prefer the freedom of a hobbled laissez faire to little or none under a planned economy. This later book is a postscript with a plan, a belated proposal for getting out of difficulty, a written warning to his opponents that the author has n’t surrendered but is just beginning to fight.