Page:The Real Cause of the High Price of Gold Bullion.djvu/48

 If neither of the above plans appear eligible, it is at least hoped that no Plan will be adopted for unnaturally forcing the Market price of Bullion to the Mint price. If the Market price ever descends naturally, by the ordinary course of events, to the Mint price, and there continues, the plans suggested admit the due operation of such a state of the market as of every other. But any forced system will soon break. Let the circulation be limited by real demand, not by legislative violence. A forced restriction of currency is as much against the natural order of things as a forced issue. The latter leads to depreciation and discredit: the former to stagnation and non-production.

If there is still a strong predilection for our former system, let us at least give sufficient time for the experiment to be tried, whether the ordinary process of events will bring things round in such a manner as that the system will, as it were, resume itself. But making use of Parliamentary force to bring about any system, against the natural tendency of affairs, savors too much of the obstinacy of prejudice: and when it is considered that all our manufacturing and commercial investments, speculations and transactions, have been formed upon the presumption of the continuance of an extensive circulation, and of grant pecuniary accommodations, might it not be deemed something like a gratuitous breach of faith, if all the valuable concerns of a most important class of individuals were sacrificed to the support of a sophism, and the best interests of the nation endangered, in order to conjure a commodity into a Coin, and to transform a perpetual fluctuation into an invariable standard.

Perhaps from the variety of opinions and prejudices public and recorded, and from the supposed difficulties on the subject of currencies, by which the ablest men have