SECTION F._ECONOMIC SCIENCE AND STATISTICS. 
THE GOLD STANDARD 
ADDRESS BY 
PROF. J. H. JONES, 
PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION. 
Wuen the Association, through its representatives, conferred upon me 
the honour of electing me President of Section F for the current year, 
I felt that the subject of the Presidential Address was determined for me 
by the present state of affairs in the world. Currency stability, broadly 
defined—or, better, undefined—is a condition of economic and social 
progress. The outstanding problem of statesmanship is to restore that 
stability which the world enjoyed before the outbreak of the recent war. 
I believe that the causes of present instability and the conditions of 
future stability can be described without the introduction of technical 
terms likely to bewilder those who are not professional economists. 
I therefore felt it to be my duty to devote my paper to a discussion of the 
gold standard and to address the lay rather than the professional section 
of the audience. I shall begin with a very brief survey of the past. 
Li 
Before the war of 1914-18 the gold standard was among the things 
taken for granted as an element of western civilisation. It had served 
England for nearly a century. The echoes of the bimetallic controversy 
on the continent of Europe had already died away. It was a controversy 
that belonged to the nineteenth century. The silver question had 
ceased to be ‘spot news’ in the newspapers of the United States of 
America. The spirit of nationalism in currency affairs was on holiday. 
When, in the last three decades of the nineteenth century, one country 
after another joined the gold standard group, their action was held to be 
a sign of progress and they seemed to hold their heads higher than before. 
They acquired prestige. It was thought that in the Far East the process 
of industrialisation would be marked—as, indeed, it had already been 
marked in India and Japan—by a transition from a silver standard to 
a gold standard adjusted to national conditions. 
An unvarying price average was not, however, among the achievements 
of the gold standard. For roughly two decades before the Franco- 
Prussian war, the so-called general level of prices had risen under the 
