Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 43.djvu/602

384 in some way proportionate to the enlarged foundation on which it rests. After a brief respite the difficulties which it was proposed thus to obviate will reappear with undiminished intensity. The surer method, and that which is developing under the stress of need and the growth of experience, is to strengthen the foundation rather than to enlarge it. The specie which serves as the basis of the swelling volume of credit transactions is massed in fewer hands, and so is made more effective in sustaining the superstructure. The great public banks of European countries are guardians of the treasure which gives tone to their currency and serves as the standard for transactions in which it is used to less and less extent in bodily shape. The central stock which serves the same purpose in the United States is held, not by a semi-public institution to whom the duty has been delegated, but by the Federal Treasury directly. Its amount has been seriously lessened of late, and may be subject to further drain in the immediate future. But there are no indications that the supply of gold obtainable for this, purpose is inadequate, in the United States or in the world at large, to serve the uses likely to be made of it in the future. Our own reserve should be enlarged; and there can be little doubt that the community, once aroused to the situation, will not permit it to shrink to the point of real danger. So far as the visible future is concerned, we may therefore look to the maintenance of the gold standard by all the great civilized countries. Silver will be used for subsidiary purposes to some extent in all advanced countries, and apparently to a very large extent in the United States. But silver will not again become standard money, freely coined for all holders. It will have to seek its market, partly for use in the arts, partly for subsidiary purposes as money in the countries of advanced civilization, partly for more or less complete monetary use in regions like India, China, and South America. Within the last two months the British Government in India has taken a step of far-reaching consequence, in suspending the free coinage of silver in that country. The step is not definitive, and it remains to be seen what policy will finally be adopted. Whatever may be done, a considerable flow of silver to India is likely to continue in the future; the market for the metal there has by no means been wiped out. But the conditions under which silver can be disposed of must be seriously affected by the cessation of unlimited coinage in the country in which alone very large quantities found their way into permanent monetary use through a free mint. The new move, moreover, whatever its effect may be on the quantity of silver which will actually find its way to India, must in any case have an important effect on the future of silver in its political aspects. It wipes out the possibility of free coinage of silver in