Page:Tales in Political Economy by Millicent Garrett Fawcett.djvu/78

 who had promised to pay a debt in a hundred cocoa-nuts in six months' time would perhaps find that, owing to the destruction of the nuts by monkeys, or to the discovery of an additional number of the trees, the difficulty of obtaining cocoa-nuts had become during the six months either much greater or much less than it was when he made his bargain; and in this way commercial transactions that extended over any lengthened period of time were liable to great uncertainty owing to the fluctuations in value of the substance used as money.

Inconvenience, similar in character, though not so great in degree, was now felt to attend the steady rise in the value of gold and silver in Isle Pleasant. If a man made an agreement to pay a certain sum of money, say 10l. a-year, for ten years as the rent of a house that had been built by one of his neighbours, it was quite certain that, owing to the gradual rise in value of gold, his rent would in reality increase each year; till at the end of the ten years the same amount of money would perhaps represent twice as much value in goods