184 The Stock Market Crash—dAnd After

I found he was right. Germans thought of commodities
 as rising and thought of the American gold
dollar as rising. They thought we had somehow cornered
 the gold of the world and were charging an
outrageous price for it. But to them the mark was
all the time the same mark. They lived and breathed
and had their being in an atmosphere of marks, just
as we in America live and breathe and have our being
in an atmosphere of dollars. Professor Roman and
I talked at length with twenty-four men and women
whom we met by chance in our travels in Germany.
Among these only one had any idea that the mark
had changed.
“Of course, all the others knew that prices had
risen, but it never occurred to them that this rise
had anything to do with the mark. They tried to
explain it by the ‘supply and demand’ of other goods;
by the blockade; by the destruction wrought by the
war; by the American hoard of gold; by all manner
of other things—exactly as in America, when, a
few years ago, we ourselves talked about the ‘high
cost of living,” we seldom heard anybody say that
a change in the dollar had anything to do with it.”

Gyrations of the Dollar
But Germans and Americans alike kept their ac
counts in what was, in reality, a fluctuating unit, in
one case the mark and in the other the dollar.
The dollar, reckoned as a yardstick of goods
values, shrinks and expands. Doctor E. W. Kemmerer.
 who was an expert adviser to the Dawes