Through European Eyes [Nothing could be more useful for Great
Britain than to see how her difficulties are regarded abroad. li-e shall therefore publish during the next few weeks a representative selection of extracts translated from the Continental Press. j OUTWARDLY the view is still being propagated throughout the length and breadth of England that the fact of going off the gold standard has no particular importance as regards the standard of living of the masses and that, on the whole, everything will go on as before. How long this fiction, designed to suggest to people that conditions are better than they really are, can be maintained is another question. The chief commodity markets regulating supply and demand in the wholesale field are already eloquent. The man in the street, on whose healthy common sense so much stress is laid, may not yet understand that language, he may perhaps at present fail to grasp the connexions between the gold-price of sterling and the higher nominal wholesale prices, but he will certainly have a rude shock when the diminished value of the pound comes to be reflected in the retail products in the shops, in the shape of higher prices. . . . Involuntarily one has the impression, reading the English newspapers, that even the upper classes on the other side of the Channel are not yet fully aware what prodigious and fateful consequences the separation of the currency from sterling must entail for the whole economic system of the country. . . . Granted that we Germans, who have been through the hard school of monetary depreciation, should have a better understanding of what it means to have a depreciated currency . . . but the facts will soon overtake present illusions, though they may not work themselves out to the bitter end such as we went through. . . ."
—Kanische Zeitung (Berlin), 28.9.31.
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