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 mystifi- 
cation seldom pays in the long run.