WHY SOME PRICES SHOULD RISE 17 
sary articles, or else employers of a particularly needy and deserv- 
ing class which will be thrown out of work by the rise. All the 
injured persons are at once represented as being iniquitously 
robbed by an unscrupulous gang of speculators, middlemen, 
blood-sucking capitalists, or rack-renting landlords against whom 
all the resources of the State ought to be brought forthwith. 
The ideal somewhat vaguely held seems to be an immediate 
return to the prices of a few months or a year ago. 
With those general rises and falls in the value of goods measured 
in gold which are merely the reverse side of falls and rises in the 
value of gold measured in goods, I do not intend to deal here. 
They are almost obviously bad, and there is no doubt that the 
remedy will ultimately have to be found in a cosmopolitan regu- 
lation of the output of gold or whatever may be adopted as the 
standard of value. This remedy certainly cannot be applied 
under the present international conditions, and it is therefore 
unnecessary to talk about it at the moment. Moreover, what- 
ever general rise of prices attributable to currency conditions 
there may be at present, the convulsion of particular prices is 
far more obvious and important. 
When the war began, people thought a good deal of the things 
which would become unsaleable at their previous prices, and of 
the resulting unemployment of those who had been employed in 
producing them. We shall hear more of this when peace arrives. 
Just now attention is concentrated on the things which have 
risen in price, and the rise, as usual, is regarded as bad. 
An old epigram says that high prices are their own cure, and I 
suppose hardly anyone will deny that there is some truth in the 
suggestion. If the price of a thing which can be produced goes 
up, and is expected to remain up, we usually suppose more of it 
will be produced than would have been produced if the price had 
remained where it was. At the present moment, for example, we 
are expecting a great deal more wheat from the next harvest 
than would have been forthcoming if wheat had remained, and 
had been expected to remain, at its pre-war price. It is conceiv- 
able that the various governments of the world might have all 
established maximum prices for bread at the old level, and have 
resolved to maintain these maxima, and that every one might 
have had complete confidence in their ability to do so. In that 
case no farmer would have expected to get a higher price than