Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/100

 80 connected with the difficulty of fixing on the best standard of value. A flood of light was thrown on this subject by the excellent work of Bishop Fleetwood. He had preached a sermon, which had been one of the first utterances that called attention to the deficiencies of our coinage, and the evils of a clipped currency; and the manner in which he discussed the variations of silver as a standard of value showed that he had clearer views on the subject than many of his contemporaries. lt was comparatively easy to prove that coins could not be rated very differently from the exchange value of the bullion they contained, but it was not so easy to see what determined the value of the precious metals as bullion. The difficulty was rendered greater since men argued that while other commodities were naturally sought after because they supported human life, or ministered to individual human needs, silver was only prized because mankind had agreed to use it as money. Locke was a mercantilist to the backbone, but so far from regarding money as the only kind of wealth he is inclined to deny that it was of the nature of wealth at all, except by mere agreement. Under such circumstances it was plausible to maintain that the same convention which caused it to be wealth, definitely assigned its value in exchange. No serious attempt could be made at adopting a single standard for the coinage and keeping to it till the fact that the value of silver bullion varied with regard to the other precious metals, and with regard to commodities of every sort was fully recognized. Fleetwood's Chronicon Preciosum takes the form of a discussion on a point of casuistry. 'The statutes of a certain college,' he says, '(to the observation of which, every one is sworn, when admitted fellow) vacating a fellowship if the fellow has an estate in land of inheritance or a perpetual pension of £5 per annum, I desire you would be pleased to give me your answer to the following questions, when I have first told you that the college was founded between the years 1440 and 1460.' The third question was the important one; it ran as follows:—'Whether he who is actually possessed of an estate of £6 per annum as money and things go now, may safely take that oath, upon presumption that £6 now, is not worth what £5 was, when that statute was made.' He goes on to show that gold and silver had both fallen in value with regard to commodities, but that they had kept about, though not quite, the same proportion towards one another. The discussion of the silver coinage is very careful, and there is a mass of facts in the two chapters in which he proves that silver had fallen