44 MODERN MONETARY SYSTEMS 
Office in the Argentine received gold and supplied 227-27 
paper pesos in exchange for a weight in gold correspond- 
ing to 100 former pesos, the exchange could obviously 
not rise above this rate by more than the cost of trans- 
mitting the gold ; for anyone desiring to obtain Argentine 
currency, whether a foreign debtor or a national of the 
country owed money from abroad and wishing to con- 
vert his credit into home currency, would have no reason 
for buying a draft on the Argentine at a higher price in 
gold, or for selling a foreign bill at a lower price in paper 
pesos.! 
§ 5. Monetary Reform in Austria-Hungary. 
While a certain number of countries outside Europe 
had thus attempted more or less consistently to reform 
their monetary systems by using the gold standard but 
without having an effective gold currency, other countries, 
of internal monetary units which is fixed, because it is in terms of gold that 
the unit is defined. The possibility afforded by an institution like the Con- 
version Office in the Argentine, of obtaining in exchange for gold a fixed 
amount of home currency in the form of notes, leads to exactly the same 
result; it is another way of turning foreign gold into currency on the basis 
of a par corresponding to the real or hypothetical contents of gold in the 
home currency. 
1'The import gold point ceased, of course, to be effective if foreign 
countries prohibited the export of their gold; as we shall see later, this is 
how the working of the Conversion Office in the Argentine has been 
impeded since the war. But it will be seen (Part III, Ch. II) that this 
difficulty is not insuperable. 
The example of the Argentine had been followed in 1906 by Brazil, 
where a Conversion Office was created. It differed, however, in several 
respects from the Argentine institution. In the first place, it only converted 
its own notes, thus leaving inconvertible a part of the currency, but it had 
a guarantee fund which was of assistance when it began its operations. 
Secondly, the amoynt of notes to be issued in exchange for the gold received 
was limited—320,000 contos or 20 million pounds—and in 1910 this 
prevented the import gold point from being effective, and caused the 
Office to suspend operations for the first time. For a more detailed account 
see the above-quoted works by Subercaseaux and Masson-Forestier, which 
contain a fairly full bibliography, and lastly Souza Reis, “O padrio de 
cambio ouro como solugao do problema monetario brasilieiro,” Sao Paolo, 
1923.