Page:The rise, progress, and phases of human slavery.djvu/149

 thing signified, made such by Act of Parliament; they will neither feed us, nor clothe us, nor house us through their ''own inherent qualities''. It is we ourselves who give them all their gigantic power; we make them a legal tender. Thus credulity set up graven images in the temples of old; and Labour, having deposited all its earnings on the shrine, bent its knee before the shining metal, and implored food and raiment from the idol carved with its own hands. Common sense would have appealed to the plough and the loom.

We have said that the precious metals, when made a legal tender by the legislature, are still no more than signs of the thing signified; what, then, is the thing signified, whose value they measure, and in measurement represent? We answer, all those things of value which, in return for a sufficient inducement, are capable of being transferred from one person to another. These are expressed by the terms Property, Capital, Stock. All these possess intrinsic value, for they represent accumulated labour; and accumulated labour is the result of a continuous consumption of corn—the standard of all values—the staff of life, without which neither property, capital, nor stock could be accumulated, without which, indeed, the race of civilised man could not be perpetuated. A granary full of corn, or a warehouse full of cottons and woollens, are examples of real money: they may exist while the proprietors of them have not an ounce of gold or silver in their coffers; and, in a mercantile sense, they may be poor, nay, necessitous, with all this wealth in their possession; because corn, cottons, and woollens are not legal tenders according to Act of Parliament,—no man is bound to take them in acquittance of a debt,—they are not a satisfaction to the sheriff. It is idle to say that such persons may obtain relief through a banker: the very application shows a state of dependence into which the holder of real money ought never to be reduced: for he who produces the thing signified ought not to be under the control or caprice of him who merely deals in its sign. Moreover, the banker himself may be unable to give any accommodation: gold and silver may have left the country; even the Bank of England may be so crippled as to have borrowed some millions of the precious metals from France: we may be within twenty-four hours of barter. Is this a picture of the imagination? No; it is a faithful sketch of what has happened; and why should it not happen again, the same causes remaining in readiness to act?

What is the lesson that such considerations ought to teach? It is this, that a nation, rich in real money, may be thrown into bankruptcy, and perhaps revolution, by adopting a false representative of value, through the privation of that gold which its legislature recognises as the sole legal tender. Let the gold go, what remains? Our land, retaining its fertility; our machinery, capable of continuing its work; our vessels, as seaworthy as before; our skilled industry, with its intelligence unimpaired; our unskilled labour, not a whit enfeebled in its natural productive powers. These are the elements of real money.

In the island of Guernsey it was proposed to build a meat