Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/98

 good sense, "is that of a mark of silver—a half pound of the weight of eight ounces. The weight and the standard alone make this intrinsic value." (Voltaire, "Système de Law.") But the question: What is the value of an ounce of gold or of silver? still remains. If a cashmere from the establishment of the great Colbert bore the trade mark of the manufactory, pure wool, this mark would still not tell us the value of the cashmere. The question of how much the wool was worth would still remain. "Philippe I., King of France," says M. Proudhon, "mixed with the pound (sterling) of Charlemagne a third of alloy, imagining that as he alone had the monopoly of the manufacture of money he could do what any trader having a monopoly can do. What was the effect of this alteration of the coinage with which Philippe and his successors have been so strongly reproached? A very sound reasoning, from the commercial point of view, but very unsound in economic science, is to suppose that, as supply and demand regulate value, it is possible, either by producing an artificial scarcity or by monopolising the manufacture, to increase the estimation and consequently the value of things, and that this is true of gold and silver as well as of corn, wine, oil or tobacco. However, the fraud of Philippe was no sooner suspected than his money was reduced to its proper value, and he at once lost all that he imagined he had gained out of his subjects. The same thing would happen as the result of any similar attempts."

To begin with, it has been demonstrated over and over again that if the monarch debases the coinage it is he who suffers the loss. What he has gained once by the first issue he loses as many times as the falsified money returns to him in the form of duties, taxes, &c. But Philippe and his successors knew how to more or