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292 use, arranged in quantities corresponding to their relative consumption, so as to give the rise or fall, from time to time, of the mean of prices; which will indicate, with all the exactness desirable for commercial purposes, the variations in the value of money; and enable individuals, if they shall think fit, to regulate their pecuniary engagements by reference to this tabular standard."

Another writer who made the same suggestion was G. Poulett Scrope, M. P., An Examination of the Bank Charter Question, with an Inquiry into the Nature of a Just Standard of Value (London, 1833), p. 26, and Principles of Political Economy (London, 1833), p. 406.

Another was Mr. G. R. Porter, The Progress of the Nation (Sections III and IV, p. 235). He added a table showing the average fluctuations of fifty commodities monthly during the years 1833 and 1837.

W. Stanley Jevons was an enthusiastic advocate of this plan. In his Money and the Mechanism of Exchange (London, 1893), Chap. XXV, he discusses Lowe's, Scrope's, and Porter's proposals, and comments: "Such schemes for a tabular or average standard of value appear to be perfectly sound and highly valuable in a theoretical point of view, and the practical difficulties are not of a serious character. To carry Lowe's and Scrope's plans into effect, a permanent government commission would have to be created, and endowed with a kind of judicial power. The officers of the department would collect the current prices of commodities in all the principal markets of the kingdom, and, by a well-defined system of calculations, would compute from these data the average variations in the purchasing power of gold. The decisions of this commission would be published monthly, and payments would be adjusted in accordance with them."

"At first the use of this national tabular standard might be permissive, so that it could be enforced only where the parties to the contract had inserted a clause to that effect in their contract. After the