THE SILVER STANDARD AND THE EVILS OF ITS INSTABILITY 443
exist, are too indefinite to be of much practical use. The rupture of the fixed par of exchange, having destroyed a common standard of value between gold and silver countries, removed the limits on the exchange fluctuations between such countries. As a result of such variations in the value of the standard measure, trade advanced by “rushes and pauses,” and speculation became feverishly active.*
That progress of trade depends on stability is a truism which seldom comes home until it is denied in fact. It is difficult to appreciate its importance to healthy enterprise when government is stable, credit is secure, and conditions are uniform. And yet so great is the handicap of instability that everywhere business men have been led by a variety of devices to produce stability in domains enveloped by uncertainty. Everywhere there have grown up business barometers forewarning business men of impending changes and so enabling them to forearm against them by timely changes in their operations. The whole of insurance business is aimed at giving stability to economic life. The necessity which compelled all regularly established Governments to maintain standard measures by which the true proportion between things as to their quantities might be ascertained and dealings in them regulated with certainty was motivated by the same purpose. The meticulous precision with which every civilised country defines its standard measures, and the large machinery it maintains to preserve them from deviation, are only evidences of the great importance that an economic society must continue to attach to the matter of providing precision of expression and assurance of fulfilment with regard to the contracts entered into by its members in their individual or corporate capacities.
Important as are the standard measures of a community, its measures of a community, its measure of value is by far the most important of them all.† The measures of weight, extension, or volume enter only into particular transactions. If the pound, the bushel, or the yard were altered the evils would be comparatively restricted in scope. But the measure of value is all-prevading.
- Evid. Indian Currency Committee, 1898, Q. 6,290, 9,808-10.
† Cf. Harris, An Essay upon Money and Coins (reprinted by J. R. McCulloch in his volume of Scarce Tracts on Money, Part I, Chap. II, par. 21 ; Part II, Chap. II, pars. 11, 13, and 20).