Page:Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, A - Karl Marx.djvu/96

Rh role in the process of circulation as gold. But two commodities excluding all other commodities mutually exclude each other. Therefore, wherever gold and silver have by law been made to perform side by side the function of money or of a measure of value it has always been tried, but in vain, to treat them as one and the same material. To assume that there is an invariable ratio between the quantities of gold and silver in which a given quantity of labor-time is incorporated, is to assume, in fact, that gold and silver are of one and the same material, and that a given mass of the less valuable metal, silver, is a constant fraction of a given mass of gold. From the reign of Edward III to the time of George II, the history of money in England consists of one long series of perturbations caused by the clashing of the legally fixed ratio between the values of gold and silver, with the fluctuations in their real values. At one time gold was too high; at another, silver. The metal that for the time being was estimated below its value was withdrawn from circulation, melted and exported. The ratio between the two metals was then again altered by law, but the new nominal ratio soon came into conflict again with the real one. In our own times, the slight and transient fall in the value of gold compared with silver, which was a consequence of the Indo-Chinese demand for silver, produced on a far more extended scale in France the same phenomena, export of silver, and its expulsion from circulation by gold. During the years 1855, 1856 and 1857, the excess in France of gold imports over gold exports amounted to £41,580,000, while the excess of silver exports over silver imports was