IT4

MONEY

might to anyone else. But the Account did not keep
the interest permanently; from time to time it paid
over to the Exchequer its large profits (the difference
between the expense of printing and reprinting on the
one side, and the interest received on the other).
Under this scheme both the receipts from issue and
the expense of redemption were hidden, and this perhaps
made issue a little less attractive and certainly made
redemption less repellent. We may well suspect that
the redemption which occurred from 1920 to 1923 could
not have been effected if the cost had appeared in the
national accounts of those years. But financial mystification
 seldom pays in the long run.