THE GOLD BUG

Whatever else Professors Warren and Rogers have done to or for the country, their handling of the foreign exchange problem has been an unmixed if comparatively unimportant blessing. A thing apart from the befuddled inconsistencies and accidental virtues of most of the Administration's economic measures, the foreign gold buying and selling plan is a success before it starts, a success almost by definition.

Gold has at last been recognized as a commodity whose social value vanishes when it becomes an economic end and not a means. Creditor nations can now no longer imagine themselves paid for past deprivation when they inter in their vaults what they once believed to be an economic absolute. Professors Warren and Rogers may still erroneously regard the gold price of dollars as a prime mover of domestic prices, they may still overestimates the economic importance of foreign trade to the United States; but they can never again speak consistently of a "favorable" trade balance as such, and they can always, in the future, stay at least one move ahead of the people who do. For their measure has abjured in practice the desirability long since abjured in principle, of a national gold hoard, and has thus destroyed the single justification of using the term "favorable" in connection with trade balances.

The next step is cancellation of the European debt. For when a country refuses to accept gold as the final discharge of a commercial obligation, free trade and cancellation become sole alternatives. The choice between cancellation and free trade is politically no choice at all; and the outcome, even if no more than the destruction of another meaningless political fetish, the tariff, will have more than earned the professors their salt.