Page:Forgotten Man and Other Essays.djvu/214

206 its value, they are of no use. It does so now. If they mean that silver shall be enabled to pay debts in some other way than iron, wheat, cotton, etc., then we know what we are dealing with. There is just as much reason why the government should pay for elevators and issue certificates of the amount and quality of grain, which should be legal tender, as there is why it should assay and stamp silver for that purpose, and issue notes for it. These cases only serve to bring out the distinction between money and merchandise, and to show that the perfection of money does not lie in the direction of a multiple legal tender, but of a single standard, as sharp and definite as possible. Such a standard has the same advantages in exchange as the most accurate measures of length and weight have in surveying or in chemistry, and it is turning backward the progress of monetary science to introduce fluctuations and doubt into the standard of value, just as it would be to cultivate inaccuracy in weights and measures.

Here I am forced to notice another hasty and mischievous analogy. Some devices for composite measures of length have been adopted to avoid contraction and expansion, and it is urged that bimetallic money is a step in the same direction. I by no means assert that science can do nothing to reach a better standard of value than gold is. What progress in that direction may lie in the future no one can tell, and he would be rash who should ever presume to deny that progress can be made; but when any proposition is presented it will have to show what composite measures of length show, viz., that its action is founded on natural laws. Heat and cold act oppositely on the components of the composite measures of length, or the arrangement is such that the action of the natural forces neutralizes. No such scientific principle underlies bimetallic money. The forces determining the value of gold and silver act independently of each other and are not subject