Page:Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, A - Karl Marx.djvu/164

Rh of gold. Nothing would be changed but the nomenclature of the standard of price, which by its very nature is conventional, no matter whether such change takes place as a direct result of a change of the mint standard or indirectly owing to an increase of paper bills to an extent required by a new lower standard. Since the name £ would stand now for a fifteen times smaller quantity of gold, the prices of all commodities would increase fifteen times and two hundred and ten million one pound bills would now be actually as necessary as fourteen million had been before. To the same extent to which the combined quantity of tokens of value would increase now, the quantity of gold which each of them represents would decrease. The rise of prices would constitute but a reaction on the part of the process of circulation which forcibly equates the tokens of value to the quantity of gold which they are supposed to replace.

In the history of the debasement of money in England and France by their governments, we find repeatedly that prices had not risen in the same proportion in which the silver coinage had been debased. That was simply due to the fact that the proportion in which the currency was increased did not correspond to the proportion in which it had been debased; that is to say, because an inadequate quantity of coins of the poorer metallic composition was issued, if the exchange values of commodities were to be estimated in the future in the new coin as a measure of value and be realized in coins corresponding to this smaller unit of measure. This solves the difficulty left unsettled in the controversy between Locke and Lowndes. The ratio which a token of value, whether