Page:Stabilizing the dollar, Fisher, 1920.djvu/137

Rh commerce have passed through the evolution from the rough-and-ready units of primitive times to the accurate ones of to-day, when modern science puts the finest possible point on measurements of all kinds.

Once the yard was defined, in a rough-and-ready way, as the girth of the chieftain of the tribe and was called a gird. Later it was the length of the arm of Henry the First and, still later, the length of a bar of iron in the Tower of London. To-day we have at Washington a Bureau of Standards where the modern yardstick is determined by a bar of metal alloy kept in a room of constant temperature, under a glass case, and not approached by the observer, lest the warmth of his body should cause it to vary, but sighted by a telescope across the room!

Except the dollar, none of the old rough-and-ready units are any longer considered good enough for modern business. The dollar is the only survival of those primitive crudities. Imagine the modern American business man tolerating a yard defined as the girth of the President of the United States! Suppose contracts in yards of cloth to be now fulfilled which had been made in Mr. Taft's administration!

And yet the shrinkage in such a yardstick would be no greater than the shrinkage we have suffered in the far more important yardstick of commerce, the dollar; and this yardstick is used in all the contracts in which the yardstick of length is named and in all others besides!

Consequently the evils our unstabilized dollar works—evils of confusion, uncertainty, social injustice, discontent, and disorder—are as vast as would be the evils experienced if all the other units of commerce—