ABSTRACT
THE history of that post-war period is so closely intertwined with, and so much disturbed by, monetary happenings that the real situation which underlay and dominated everything else is not always clearly envisaged. The bones of this skeleton must be displayed in full light without their trappings of flesh. Only so will it be possible to understand the many and subtle ways in which these trappings reacted on the development of the skeleton itself. To that end I have set out in this preliminary chapter a brief account, not of what was, but of what, had the trappings been absent, might have been.
