exceeds that of the latter about twenty-five million times. With a similar kind of assurance the student of the Hindu scriptures must reject the belief in the accidental analogies of Buddhism and Christianity.

The question as to the comparative ethical merit of the two religions belongs to an entirely different province of inquiry. Christianity has certainly surpassed its parent creed in adapting itself to the purposes of a cosmopolitan mission, and there is no doubt that its westward progress has emancipated its doctrine from many Oriental prejudices.

By a similar process the English language, since its transmigration to the American continent, has been purged of much provincial dross, and we may admit that many expressive Americanisms have no equivalent in the idiom of the Elizabethan era. American patriots of a future generation may go further. They may question the inspiration of Byron's poetry and the force of Bacon's logic; they may demonstrate the unfitness of British fogs to generate anything but a muddled dialect, and assert that only an American climate could evolve the pure English of Boston and Philadelphia; but even then their nativism could not hope to rival the knownothing zeal of theological loyalists, unless they should attempt to deny the transatlantic origin of that paragon language.

SILVER COINAGE.

BY E. D. STARK.

THE current comment in financial circles upon the subject of Silver Coinage is exasperating. The main end that ought to be kept in view in the legal constitution of primary or standard money, is provokingly dropped out of remark, and instead, the air is filled with prophecy of dishonor and other nebulous calamities inherent in unlimited silver; together with small criticisms based on these coins, regarded merely as subsidiary currency and pocket conveniences, or proceeding upon totally false assumptions of elementary doctrine, going even to the length of an assault upon the dictionary.

Too many of these fallacies are abroad, for specific reference here, and consulting brevity, they must be answered in groups and by implication from propositions affirmative of elementary principles.

Money may take many forms and serve in various modes. It may serve merely as a nominal scale for appraising and reducing goods, to numerically defined bartering relations. It may consist of symbols, tickets, or printed promises, to be themselves exchanged and re-exchanged for other marketable things, as for buying and selling. But ultimate or primary money, the specific thing which symbolic or promise money is always understood to mean, consists of definite duly certified units of a money metal, into the terms of which capital, resources, or purchasing power may be converted for convenient storage and transport, or loan upon interest.

Now in each and all of these uses there is just one excellence so transcendent as to sink all others out of mentionable regard in comparison; an excellence which if a money has, it will be honest, fair, and friendly to all the great beneficiencies of economic intercourse and all wealth-creating processes; but which not possessing, money will be converted into an instrument of oppression, wrong, and fraud. That excellence is constancy or stability in value.

No one who is at all conversant with the literature of this

subject, or who has observed the course of prices since 1873, and comprehends the meaning of the words he uses, will deny that silver has been more stable in value than gold, by all of the difference which is commonly called the "fall of silver." So absolutely, palpably, and confessedly, is this true of the metals, to every person having a competent intelligence, that one with difficulty preserves a forensic decorum, at the spectacle of eminent and much-speaking financiers and publicists, arguing that inasmuch as this great increase in the value or purchasing power of gold (some forty or fifty per cent. since 1873) has been caused by the multiplication of goods, consequent on improved processes and agencies of production, that therefore there is no proof of any increase in the value of gold at all! They fail to understand that value is of the nature of a ratio between two factors, like a common fraction, and that no constancy in value is possible, under a condition of a change in the quantity of one of the terms, only as the other changes pari passu. They fail to see that no statute or convention can confer fixity of value upon anything, for value is not intrinsic. To talk of the "intrinsic value metal or anything else, is discourse as vacuous as to talk of the intrinsic ratio of a number. The value of a thing is unthinkable, except as some other thing is implied in the terms of which, or by reference to which, its value is to be estimated. Value is a commercial relation. Broadly and generally it is market equivalence. Concretely and specifically it is the second term in a trade. If, therefore, the second term in a trade, say wheat, has increased from its former trading rate, the first term, say dollars, remaining the same identical thing, then has the latter increased in value as so computed: this by definition, regardless of all question of causes.

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It is error in this general discussion, to gauge the value of money by labor. There can be no definite unit of muscular strain or mental and physical endurance. The efficiency of a day's labor is itself so variable, and tends to be more and more so, by the rapidly increasing intelligence, skill, and fidelity by which it is guided, so that it is a very different thing from what it was fifty, or even twenty-five years ago. Besides, a sounder economic science requires us to regard the operative as justly a sharer by some pro rata, in the product. More equitable relations arise by the automatic adjustment of freely competing impersonal products, standing each upon

its own merits, than by the passions and sentimentalisms forever obtruding in the personal relation of employer and employee. Judged by its productivity, as it should be measured, a unit of labor becomes indefinite and variable; while a ton of hay, coal or metal, a barrel of pork or flour, a gallon of turpentine or oil, a bale of cotton, a pound of wool, sugar, or butter, etc., are all clearly defined and fixed units of commodities, having the same familiar and approximately stable qualities, utilities, and relations to the common needs, and so become proper criteria of comparison. When, therefore, a given sum of money, say $1,000, will buy a larger aggregate quantity of these great staples, then has the value of a dollar become by just so much appreciated. When that condition continues through a series of years, extending over the entire area where the same money-standard prevails, then is the proof clear and conclusive, that the "Standard" is misbehaving in its supreme office. Then there is a loud call for repeal of a statute which makes such behavior of standard money possible.

If industrial processes have rendered labor more efficient, then should all of the benefit inure to labor, capital, invention, enterprise, and all the other tributaries to that increased productiveness, and no jot of it go to the enlargement of the measuring unit the dollar. The natural course of events under bi-metallism was tending in just that direction, for the output of the money metals was increasing approximately with the increase of goods. That beneficent tendency was thwarted by the act of 1873. The motive of the act is unwittingly confessed, by the admission that but for that act our money would have been cheaper, that is, would have less purchasing power, and that by a repeal of it the unit of valuation would be again restored to its former dimensions.

Now if the silver all these years has been stable and constant, that is, if prices of the great staples of food and fabric have, in terms of silver, say rupees, been proximately unchanging -while prices as computed in gold have fallen about one third, and if furthermore, there is a reasonable probability of those market relations of goods to gold and silver respectively, continuing in the future under a single standard policy, then the superiority of silver as a valuing or money metal is proven, for with unlimited coinage the silver "dollar" will take on the same value as the bullion has, which goes to its making.

The ground of this superiority, actual and prospective, is

not far to seek. Immemorial usage of three quarters of the human race, in estimating all things in terms of silver, the more permanent sources of supply, and more systematic and gradually increasing production of silver-all guarantee a more stable quantity relation to population and goods, of money based on silver alone, than on gold alone, though when it shall be again relegated to its ancillary and subordinate place in the monetary system, gold will be again an equitable and useful money metal.

The familiar comparison of a dollar to a yard-stick is misleading, in that value, unlike length, lies in estimation, and estimation varies with the ten thousand varying conditions of trading men. To make it apposite, we should give the yardstick a similar expansive and contractive quality. Made of rubber, though scaled off in inches and fractions, it would be still thirty-six of its own inches long, although stretched to measure fifty per cent. more of cloth for every length unit. In such a case, the claim of its constancy as a measure, based upon the ground that it was always "just thirty-six inches," would fitly illustrate the profundity of those who prove the stability of the pound, by its always being " just twenty shillings" and of the gold dollar as always being "just one hundred cents." Yet that and other platitudinary vacuities make up the staple of the current monometallic argument.

To briefly summarize my advocacy of free coinage: - I hold constancy in value to be the desideratum in monetary legislation. Constancy in the value of money, is precisely the same fact as stability in the general range of prices.

The great fall of prices in gold standard countries, is proof that money constituted on it alone is unstable, and therefore bad money, from the standpoint of statesmanship. Normal prices in silver standard countries proves the superiority of silver money for the equities and beneficiencies of business. If our money were all brought to equivalence with silver bullion, as it would be by free coinage, and gold it self again anchored to silver, the superior valuing metal, and compelled to come down to a ratio of 1.16 with it, on peril of dismissal from the valuing office in our commerce (though retaining its minting right at that ratio), our money would be more honest and efficient, both in its office of measuring goods for transfer and as a mode of loanable capital; which is the free coinage argument in a nut shell.