Page:The rise, progress, and phases of human slavery.djvu/148

 hatched, as attempt to tie down the population and commerce of this great country to the Procrustean bed of Peel's monetary system as established by his laws of 1819 and 1844. That system alone, were there no other causes in operation, ''must sooner or later produce a convulsion in this country, if it be not speedily unmade by wiser and better men than its authors''. To pretend that the rights of property exist in a country where such a monetary system coexists with private ownership of the soil, is a monstrous perversion of language. It is not the rights of property, but the wrongs of robbery, that these land and money laws tend to conservate.

The prime necessity of man is to live: he cannot live without corn, unless in the lowest condition of the savage; but he may not only live, but live in comfort, without gold or silver. They are not the "staffs of life," however in our ignorance we may bow the knee to them as to graven images. We invest them with supreme power, as superstition invests its idols. The ancient fabulist who sketched the character of Midas seems to have written, by anticipation, a satire on modern credulity. Midas enjoyed the fatal gift of turning all he touched into gold; his food was transmuted into the precious metal, and starvation taught him that corn was the true standard of all that was physically valuable. Midas was the prototype of modern bullionists and moneymongers. The Bank of England can now pave its floors with gold; but what does it avail to the people? And yet was it not the industry of the people that raised the ore from the mines, and brought it hither by the sale or exchange of their labour, sustained by corn, the produce of labour in another form? What was the intrinsic value of gold to Midas?

We must not confound the qualities of a mineral with its properties. Undoubtedly, the precious metals possess durability, sameness, great value in small bulk, portability, resistance to wear and tear, in a greater degree than any other substances; but these qualities per se do not constitute them money,—they do no more than recommend them to mercantile nations as the best instruments of their kind out of which money can be manufactured; it is the act of the legislature, and that alone, which gives them the character and force of a legal tender, without which they would not form part of the currency of a nation. The legislature could confer the same power on any other material, even the most worthless, as Lycurgus did on iron, deprived of its malleability; and yet Sparta flourished with that circulating medium; nay, more, Sparta fell into ruin when the precious metals superseded the worthless iron, which its rulers were compelled to revive before the Republic was restored to prosperity. Some Eastern nations have used cowries (small shells) as money; and the Russians, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, employed the skins of squirrels and martens. We ourselves use paper, and have used it without the condition of convertibility. In fact, if gold and silver had never been deposited in the bowels of the earth, or had been suffered to remain there, the wealth of nations would not have been deteriorated one farthing. They are the signs of the