the whole of any one venture. His plan of campaign

is more likely to be as follows: He will buy an established business at a low figure because he knows (often through special sources of information), or he shrewdly guesses, that conditions are about to change, and that the business can be made more profitable in the near future. Being in good credit, he will be able to persuade financial institutions to lend him a large part of the money by way of Debenture or Preference stock, and he will take good care to reserve to himself the power to borrow from his bankers if the need should arise.
Thus the rich man will only provide a small proportion of the necessary money himself. The bulk of the money will be provided by the banks and by the financial institutions. He will promise a fixed annual payment to these and will reserve for himself the whole of the extra profit if it materialises.
If the price level goes up, or in other words, if the value of the £ declines or depreciates, the rich man will in due course pay off his debts in depreciated sterling and rake in the profits.
Accordingly, inflation, or a rise in prices, benefits the rich man and the speculator, SUFFERERS FROM HIGH PRICES The people who suffer from inflation are the investor in Debenture and Preference stock and in Government securities, the pensioner and all persons who rely upon a fixed income in terms of money, and also the working man, for he Is unlikely to be able to secure a sufficient advance in wages to make up for the rise in prices.
And here it must he noted that the less well organised workman will be more likely to suffer than the better organised workman. That is to say, in general, the poorer the workman the more he is likely to suffer (probably unknowingly) from inflation.
But remember, there are two important advantages to be gained from inflation. On the one hand, the unemployed are absorbed into industry, and on the other, the whole pace of industry is quickened, and the sum total of useful goods and services is increased.
Therefore, if there is a choice between inflation and deflation, inflation is preferable.
ADVANTAGE OF STEADY PRICE LEVEL But a steady price level is greatly to be preferred to either inflation or deflation. For prices cannot rise for ever. A rise in prices if it gets out of control will lead to a complete collapse of the curency, as happened in Germany in 1923. Such a nightmare is too terrible to contemplate.
Unless you are prepared to put up with a continuous rise in prices leading to currency collapse-to chaos and probably to Bolshevism-it is almost inevitable that your rise in prices-your merry inflationwill in due course be followed by a deflation, with its attendant tragedies of business losses and unemployment.
The solution, I venture to assert, is to find some method of keeping commodity prices steady, or at least of keeping their fluctuations within a very narrow range.
In my subsequent articles I hope to show how this can be done.