ABSTRACT
THE international gold standard is by no means such an old and venerable institution as most people seem to believe. It is a monetary system constructed by Great Britain after the disorders of the Napoleonic Wars: it developed into an international gold standard after the Franco-German War in the beginning of the seventies. Gradually a series of countries joined this international monetary system, which became fairly universal when the United States, at the end of the century, after the great bimetallic struggle, had definitely established its monetary system on the basis of gold. This international system of money was maintained until the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, when it collapsed. Post-War monetary history is the record of strenuous efforts to restore an international gold-standard system, and of the final failure of those efforts.
