Let us state this proposition more at length.

To measure is to number; all measurements are ascertainments of numerical relations; numerical relations can only be stated in numbers.

But in point of fact, measurements are made with yardsticks, pound-weights, and the like.

If to measure

What is the reason for such a practice? is to number, why will not numbers alone, without yardsticks or pound-weights, serve to measure length, weight, etc.?

Because numbers are abstract and illimitable, whilst the things to be measured are concrete and limited; and in order to measure them with precision it is necessary to employ concrete and limited measures. To say that the length of a building is 100, means nothing; to say that it is equal to that of 100 yards, meaning 100 yard-sticks, has a precise significance, and one which everybody comprehends.

But

In order to measure value, it would certainly seem that just as concrete and limited a money is required as yardsticks for distances, or gallon measures for volumes. whilst the law defines the dimensions of a yard, a pound, and a gallon, with great precision, it wholly fails and omits to define the dimensions of money.

It follows that money, until it be precisely defined and limited, is little better than an abstraction; and to say that its function is to measure value is to say a thing that, however true, can have, as matters now stand, no practical use.

Remembering the present position of money in the law, unnamed, unrecognised, undefined, unlimited, there exists between it and other quantitative measures not a simil

arity; but, on the contrary, the most important difference. The efficiency of measures runs no risk of being impaired, either by alterations in the law, the disturbance of peace, the currents of trade, the conspiracies of designing men, or the caprices of fashion. The efficiency of money as it now stands is liable to be affected by these causes and many others.

Under the same legal jurisdiction there is but one—an unalterable-measure of weight, one of length, one of volume, one of area, etc. These measures, carefully described and identified in the law, are kept by the Government in some safe place--for example, the Treasury building at Washington, or the Tower of London. All other weights and measures under the same law are copies or duplicates. By the aid of these copies a vast number of measurements can be made at different times, or at the same time at different places, without disturbing, changing, or wearing out the originals; and as, when a measure is once fixed and publicly defined it is plainly the interest of society to keep it so, and it would be a flagrant violation of equity to alter it, there is little or no danger that these measures will be changed by either edict or legislation.

But such is not the case with money as it now stands. It is not recognised, not defined, not limited in the law; there is no description of it to be found in the statutes of any country; there is none, for example, in the laws of the United States or Great Britain; no prototype of money is kept in any safe place by the Government; money has no peculiar size, shape, dimensions, volume; it is not a mea

sure, nor is it essentially like a measure; and to draw conclusions from its apparent resemblance to a measure is to do violence to the facts.

Those who would clothe money with the attributes of a precise measure do indeed accord it the function for which it was intended, but for which it is not at present fitted. They forget that all other measures enjoy legal recognition; that they are defined in the law with all the precision that modern scientific observation and refinement can effect; and that, on the contrary, money-as we have unthinkingly adopted it from the Feudal law—is an undefined and shapeless thing, whose dimensions and fitness as a measure of value is whatever the chances of war, trade or fashion, or the caprices of the rich, the powerful, or the indifferent, may choose to make it.

If it be argued that whilst money is not recognised nor described in the law, the undetermined fractions of money, as coins, bank notes, etc., are both recognised and described, the answer is that since the quantitative relations of such coins or bank notes to the whole money is unknown, they fail to resemble the fractions of other measures, and they cannot precisely measure anything.

Nobody has ever ventured to maintain that any one coin was the measure of value, nor that any number of coins less than the whole number in use constituted such a measure. To do so would have been to maintain a palpable absurdity. As the whole number of coins, notes, etc, is what really constitutes the measure of value, and as, at the present time, no limit is assigned to the whole number, it follows that there

If a mile were no

is no limit to the measure of value. where described in the law, but instead, some indeterminable fraction of a mile were stated to be exactly so many inches and barleycorns long, then the legal position of miles and moneys would be alike. But in such case, who would be able to determine the length of such a mile? and who can now determine the value of such a money?

If it be answered that the value of money is determined by that of the material of which it is made, the reply to this is that all the political economists, without exception, have admitted that to double the number of pieces of money of the same denomination-no matter of what material made -would be to diminish the value of each piece by one-half, and vice versâ.1 Hence it follows that the value of money is determined by numbers and not by material. But there is a reply whose cogency is far more evident than this one, because it takes the whole subject out of the sophistical realms of political economy, and scans it by the unmistaken eyes of fact. That reply is that the value of the material (gold, for example) is itself determined not by the cost of production, but chiefly by the quantity of the stock on hand; and, moreover, that—differing from all other commodities except improved land—the cost of production does not regulate the quantity produced from time to time.2

1 "If the whole money in circulation was doubled, prices would be doubled."-John Stuart Mill," Polit. Econ.," iii. 8. 2. p. 299.

2 Consult my "History of the Precious Metals," where this subject is dealt with inductively, and at great length.

Let us endeavour to comprehend the subtle function of money by looking at the subject from another point of

view.

In the laws of the United States the American gallon is described as "a vessel containing 58372.2 grains (8.3389 pounds avoirdupois) of the standard pound of distilled water, at the temperature of maximum density of water, the vessel being weighed in air in which the barometer is 30 inches at 62° Fahrenheit."

1 و

The vessel thus described is kept in the United States States Treasury building at Washington, and copies or duplicates are furnished, on application, to such persons as may desire them. It matters not how many copies of this vessel are made, nor whether they are made of brass, tin, wood, glass, or other substances; nor whether the copies are cheap, dear, stamped, unstamped, in use, or out of use, the original gallon or standard, and its functional power as a measure, remains wholly unaffected; and, for the reasons already stated, it is likely to so remain indefinitely.

Is this the case at present with the measure called money? Not at all. It is nowhere mentioned in the law; its volume, its dimensions, the number of its pieces or constituent parts, are entirely ignored. They have no place whatever in the legal institutions of the United States, nor,

1

Executive Document No. 27, 34th Congress, 3rd Session: consisting of Professor Bache's Report on Weights and Measures. Washington, 1857.

"The relation of this gallon measure to weight is said to disagree slightly with that accorded by the same authority to the bushel."Barnard's "Metric System," p. 39.