Page:Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States.djvu/395

Rh A variation in the value or carat of money, defeats its genuine end, and usefulness. It is the measure of all property, as the bushel is a measure of grain. Permanency makes measures the vehicles of justice; fluctuation, of fraud. If a fixed measure for some articles of property, will dispense justice and discourage fraud; a fluctuating measure for all articles of property, must dispense fraud and discourage justice. False weights and measures will corrupt morals, and a corruption of morals, will overturn governments founded in good principles. If such is the effect of a fraudulent mode of weighing and measuring property, by scales and measures, capable of being examined by the senses, and easy of detection; what will be the effect of measuring property, by a fraudulent mode, beyond the reach of the eye, and only to be detected by patient and deep investigation? Fluctuating money makes all weights and measures false. By extending and diminishing price alternately, the utmost evil of false weights and measures is produced, A few men, whose interest it is to do so, can cause the carat of bank currency, to fluctuate without control, account or punishment. When it diminishes the price of property (wheat for instance) twenty-five per centum, the effect to the seller is the same, as if the buyer had secretly added one fourth to the capacity of the bushel; when it increases the price co-extensively, the effect to this buyer, now the seller, is like cutting off one fourth of the same capacity. And the managers of the fluctuation, or carat of the measure, may thus gain twenty-five per centum, unjustly, by each operation.

A fluctuation between the two steadiest measures of property, gold and silver, has at some periods trenched considerably upon fair dealing, and produced oppressive consequences; adulterations of coin, are partial and temporary aggravations of these consequences, which are never long endured, because the process is physical, and easy to detect; and fluctuations of bank paper, from which the same effects in their utmost malignancy and permanency must