EDITIONS of Professor Robertson's minor classic have been appearing regularly
for twenty-five years now, and there would be no exceptional reason for noticing this, the seventeenth, but for the fact that it con- tains two new chapters. These are headed respectively " Money in the Second Great Muddle " and " Problems of Words, Thought and Action." In the first Professor Robertson disposes of the great slump, the recovery, the war and those two portentous engines of post-war money, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the International Monetary Fund. Devoted readers of earlier editions, who will have acquired an almost paternal interest in that combination of sanity and irreverence with which he makes a difficult subject readable, will be interested to know that he compares these two institutions to a pair of heifers managed in the interests of a New Monetary Club. The second of the new chapters cuts with remarkable skill and grace through the jungle of tricky words and confused thought which has overgrown monetary theory; and arrives at a number of important guides to future action. The chief of these is a balanced advocacy of the use of interest_ rates to control inflation. It is hardly surprising that, since his object is to detect permanent truth in a world of nonsense, Professor Robertson continues to make brilliant use of quotations from Alice in Wonderland.
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