444 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
“There is no contract,” Peel declared.* “public or
private, no engagement national or individual, which is
unaffected by it. The enterprises of commerce, the profits
of trade, the arrangements made in all domestic relations
of society, the wages, of labour, pecuniary transactions
of the highest amount and of the lowest, the payment of
national debt, the provision for national expenditure, the
command which the coin of the smallest denomination has
over the necessaries of life, are all affected”
by changes in the measure of value. This is because every contract, though ultimately a contract in goods, is primarily a contract in value. It is, therefore, not enough to maintain constancy in the measures of weight, capacity, or volume. A contract as one of goods may remain exact to the measure stipulated, but may nevertheless be vitiated as a contract in values by reason of changes in the measure of values. The necessity of preserving stability in its measure of value falls on the shoulders of every Government of an orderly society. But its importance grows beyond disputes as society advances from status to contract. The conservation of the contractual basis of society then becomes tantamount to the conservation of an invariable measure of value.
The work of reconstituting a common measure of value in some form or other, which those misguided legislators of the seventies helped to destroy, it was found, could not be long delayed with impunity. The consequences that followed in the wake of that legislation, as recounted before, were too severe to allow the situation to remain unrectified. That efforts for reconstruction should have been launched before much mischief was done only shows that a world linked by ties of trade will insist, if it can, that its currency systems must be laid on a common gauge.
��
- Cf. his speech dated May 6, 1844, delivered during the Commons debates on the Bank Charter Act. Hansard, Vol. XXXIV, p. 720.