Page:David Atkins - The Economics of Freedom (1924).pdf/88

 value, based on these factors, is ample for all reparation, all liquidation and a new start. We crouch frozen with fear, because we are poor in terms of gold and the world’s voluminous currency has been diluted till (in terms of gold) it has little so-called value. We have hypnotized ourselves by looking too long fixedly at a small pyramid of burnished bullion which for the present stands fenced in the centre of ample fields encircled by waiting labor.

What peace we enjoy is the stillness of bewilderment, but it holds many intimations of stampede. The more orderly nations, if circumstances are not too much for them, are still held by the threadbare convention of the dominance of gold; but gold, as an arbiter of value, will be repudiated when it is fully realized by those who suffer rather than gain by the convention, that it interposes arbitrary barriers to the free flow of human effort. It does not need a historian—it does not need even the oldest inhabitant—to predict what is going to happen, when crevice after crevice appears in a long-standing dam subject to increasing pressure, even though it has performed the utmost service in the past.

If, today, in countries such as Germany and Austria, it could be realized that the value of land area and order could be set against their enormous volume of currency, and their unit expressed in terms of square feet—or square inches, for that matter—of national territory of average population-density, definitely linked with their proportionate responsibility for the maintenance of order, then both marks and kronen would become unimpairable tokens of national value, and internal activity would be accelerated by confidence. And the difference between the United States and these unfortunate countries is only one of degree.