A Reply to Mr. Hawtrey

Abstract

First of all, I feel very pleased in thanking Mr. Hawtrey for the attention he has given to my paper. I am not sure that our theses are as close together as he thinks they are, and I shall try to make my ideas more precise in the light of his valuable objections. I beg the reader to excuse the gallicisms he may find in these few pages, but I prefer to write them myself in bad English than to have them translated. Though, thanks to the Editor, the translation of my original article was done with the utmost care, and though I myself thoroughly went through it, some nuances have been lost and even the exact meaning of my French sentences has sometimes been modified. Of this, I find a first example in the title of the paper. In the French original, the word critics applied to the arguments against the French policy and not to the authors of the arguments. I think it is the best answer I can make to the first remark of Mr. Hawtrey as to the plural of the word. I daresay that I have chosen Mr. Hawtrey's articles as typical of the English attitude towards French policy, because he is considered, on this side of the Channel, as the strongest critic of this policy and one of the best champions of British economic thought. As a proof of it, I shall only quote a sentence of Professor Charles Rist in the foreword to the new translation of Currency and Credit: Mr. Hawtrey has probably influenced British monetary policy in a decisive way. But that is only a formal matter. Let us come to the substance of my paper and to the objections it has raised. To make this answer as clear as possible, I shall consider, among Mr. Hawtrey's remarks, only those which are most essential towards my thesis. The first point is concerned with Mr. Hawtrey's explanation of the movements of gold. Here I think I shall entirely agree with the distinguished economist. That he does not limit the causality to the price level, as Ricardo does, but extends it to consumers' income and outlay, makes his theory more precise and valuable, but along the same, shall I say, mechanistic line as Ricardo's. That, in theory, Mr. Hawtrey is inclined to recognize the importance of psychological causes, I do not deny, but, as he agrees, the passages of his work he has quoted do not concern French policy. I therefore simply regret