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194. These schemes all involve not simply what Wolowski said — that legislation and union could limit the fluctuations — but the proposers know how much it would limit them, and they can control the results. This view has very few adherents in Europe. It has not been discussed there save by one or two writers. It is passed by in silence for reasons which I shall soon show.

The opinion has been expressed that these two propositions differ only in degree. From this opinion I must express my earnest dissent. It is the very cardinal point of my present argument. Wolowski's alternate standard seems to me to rest upon the belief that legislation of the kind proposed would restrict the fluctuations in value of the metals. It affirms that legislation would have a certain tendency. Any plan for a concurrent circulation giving debtors the use of the whole mass of both metals pretends to say how far the tendency would go and what its results would be. To my mind the difference between those two propositions is that between a scientific and an unscientific proposition. We have a parallel case before us. Some say re-monetization would cause an advance in silver. Others say re-monetization would make a four hundred and twelve and one-half grain silver dollar equal in value to a gold one. Are those two propositions the same save in degree? It seems to me that only a very superficial consideration of them could so declare. Obviously they differ in quality more than in degree. The former of these propositions is not false in principle; the question in regard to it must be decided by circumstances. The second is false and erroneous from beginning to end, and would be false even if temporarily and by force of circumstances the silver dollar should become equal to the gold dollar, because it rests, like the old doctrine that nature abhors a vacuum, upon false views of all the forces involved. Just so with regard to a concurrent circulation or