ABSTRACT
As we pointed out in Chapter I, monetary reform is by no means a post-war invention. The monetary system has always been subject to evolutionary and sometimes revolutionary changes, and there have always been people urging such changes. During the decades preceding the war, there was, however, no pronounced pressure in favour of monetary reform. The last powerful movement favouring a change in the monetary system was the bimetallist movement of the ’nineties which demanded not a reform but the restoration of a state of affairs that existed in days gone by. During the decades that preceded the war, the leading economists discussed the possibility from a purely academic point of view, but few of them took any definite line to that end. There was no lack of enthusiastic reformers, such as Gesell or Kitson, but the public in general took no notice of them and economists could well afford to ignore such heretics. On the whole, it may be said that before the war the world was satisfied with the existing monetary system. To be exact, that part of the world whose word carried weight in the Universities, Parliaments and in the Press showed no sign of any considerable dissatisfaction with the pre-war monetary system.
