carry off all our gold and silver, which eviscerates the banks; the banks squeeze the merchants, to the last drop of blood; and the merchants perish in the process, carrying with them hosts of mechanics, farmers, and professional men.—Not so, bellows a fourth philosopher, perhaps a little more seedy than the rest; it is all the work of "the infernal credit system,"—of the practice of making money out of that which is only a promise to pay money,—out of that which purports to have a real equivalent in some vault, when no such equivalent exists, and is, therefore, a fraud on the face of it,—and which, deluging the community, raises the price of everything, begets speculation, stimulates an excessive and factitious trade, and is then suddenly withdrawn from the system, at the height of its inflation, like wind sucked from a bladder, to leave it a mere flaccid, wrinkled, empty, worthless old film of fat!
Now, for our part, we think all the Diogenidæ right, but not precisely in the way in which they state the matter; and we think the seedy Diogenes the rightest of all,—because he has struck nearest to the centre, to the organic fact which controls the other facts,—yet, without sharing his prejudice against credit, one of the blessedest of inventions. As a very long and a very dull treatise, however, would scarcely suffice to explain all the reasons for our thinking so, we must devote the one or two pages that are given us to a few simple, elementary, frontal principles, familiar, no doubt, to every one, and therefore the more important to be recalled, when every one seems to have forgotten them. Nothing is better known than the laws of gravitation; nothing staler in the repetition; but if the folk around us are building their houses so that they all fall down upon our heads, it behooves us to remind them of those laws.
1. Human wisdom has discovered nothing clearer than this,—that in all the operations of trade above a primitive barter, you must have a standard or measure of values; and human ingenuity has never been able to devise any standard more perfect, in essential respects, than the precious metals. It may be doubted, indeed, whether the choice of these metals for currency is a result of human ingenuity. Paley and his school of theologians demonstrate the existence, intelligence, and goodness of God from the evidences of design in creation,—from that nice adaptation of means to ends which shows an infinite knowledge and infinite benevolence at work; but no one of the instances in which they found their argument, from the watch, which affords the primal illustration, to the human body, which furnishes the most complex confirmations, is a more astonishing or exquisite proof of pre-arrangement than is the adaptedness of gold and silver to the purposes of currency. Your standard or measure, for instance, must, in the first place, possess a certain uniformity; if it be a measure of capacity, it must not be of the size of a thimble in the morning, and as big as a haystack at night, like the mystic bottle of the fairy tale; if a measure of length, it must not be made of caoutchouc, as long as your finger to-day, and as long as the Atlantic Cable to-morrow; and so, if a measure of value, it must not equal one thousand at ten o'clock, and equal zero at three. But the precious metals do possess this uniformity; they are not scarce, as diamonds are, so that a pinch of them might measure the value of a city; nor are they as plenty as blackberries, so that a wagon-load could scarcely buy a fat goose for dinner. They cannot be washed away like a piece of soap, nor wear out like a bit of wampum, nor crumble like agate or carnelian in dividing. In short, they combine all the advantages that are needed, with few or none of the disadvantages that would be troublesome, in a substance which is used for money. They possess intrinsic utility, they are equably supplied, they may be easily divided and then fused again, they take a stamp, and they re-
