Page:Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, A - Karl Marx.djvu/150

Rh would be subject to constant change both as a standard of price and as a medium of circulation, a change under one of these forms leading to a change under the other and vice versa. This explains the phenomenon mentioned above, namely that in the history of all modern nations the same money-name stands for a constantly diminishing quantity of metal. The contradiction between gold as coin and gold as standard of price becomes also one between gold as coin and gold as the universal equivalent; in the latter capacity it circulates not only within the limits of national boundaries, but in the world market. As a measure of value gold was always of full weight, because it served only as ideal gold. In its capacity of equivalent in the isolated transaction C—M it passes at once from a state of motion to a state of rest; but in its capacity of coin its natural substance comes in constant conflict with its function. The transformation of the gold sovereign into fictitious gold can not be wholly avoided, but legislation seeks to prevent its unlimited circulation as coin by prescribing its withdrawal from circulation as soon as its shortage of metallic substance reaches a certain degree. According to the English law, e. g., a sovereign which lacks more than 0.747 grains of its weight ceases to be legal tender. The Bank of England which weighed forty-eight million gold sovereigns in the short period between 1844 and 1848, possesses in Mr. Cotton's gold weighing scale a machine which not only detects a difference of 1-100 part of a grain between two sovereigns, but like a sensible being, immediately throws out the light-weight coin on a board