These Six grounds appear to be satisfactory and sufficient to account for the superior steadiness of the value of gold and silver, so far as their value is determined by considerations relating to these metals themselves. We now proceed to the two reasons additional to this why gold and silver constitute the best Money.
(2) The second general reason why gold and silver make the best money is found in the fact that Governments have little to say or do about the Value and Quantity and Mode of Circulation of such Money. In respect to Credit-Moneys, like our own Greenbacks and national Bank-Bills, the Government has everything to say. When we remember how governments are constituted, that they are only a transient Committee of the citizens for special purposes; of what sort of persons they commonly consist; the variety of subjects they are obliged to consider during short periods of office; the absence for the most part of expert knowledge among them; the enormous blunders they have made in the past in all financial measures; and that those who know the most about their action in the past and present in such matters have the least confidence in their ability to act wisely; the better we shall see the strength of the grounds of this second reason. In all essential respects money of gold and silver regulates itself. These metals came to be money and continue to be money in the main sense independent of the enactments of any Government. The people chose them: they choose them still. As we have seen, coins do not owe their value to the stamp of the Government, since the metal in them is worth within a trifle as much before coinage as after. Coinage publicly attests the quantity and quality of the metal in the coin, and that is all. Of the value of their coins governments say nothing. They can say nothing. That depends on men's judgments, and not on edicts at all. No law of the United States can add directly an appreciable fraction to the value of a gold dollar. The law makes it consist of 254⁄5 grains troy of gold 9⁄10 fine, the mint so stamps and attests it, and thereafter it takes its own chance as to value.
Some Governments charge a little something for coining for their People, and some do not. What is charged is called seignorage. England coins gold for all comers at a seignorage of .032%, which is practically a free coinage. France charges for gold .216%; and by the law of 1874, the United States charge nothing for coining gold. It is left to the People to say how much money they will have coined; and, having received it back from the mint, they may do just what they please with it; they may hoard it, they may melt it, they may sell it at home in purchase, and they may export it in foreign trade, at will. Now, it is a great gain, an immense relief, to have a Money with which the Government has nothing to do except to mint it; a money that asks no favors, needs no puffing, never deceives anybody, knows how to take care of itself, is always respectable and everywhere respected.
(3) The last general reason why gold and silver make the best Money is to be found in their physical peculiarities, in accordance with which they are (a) uniform in quality, (b) conveniently portable, (c) divisible without loss, (d) easily impressible, and (e) always beautiful.
Pure gold and pure silver, no matter where they are mined, are exactly of the same quality all over the earth. Not so with iron and coal and copper. Gold is gold, and silver is silver. The gold mined to-day in California differs in no essential respect from the gold used by Solomon in the construction of the Temple, and the silver out of the Nevada mines is the same thing as the silver paid by Abraham for the cave of Machpelah. Nature with her wise finger has thus stamped them for the universal money; and a universal coinage, that is, coins of the same degree of fineness, and brought into easy numerical relations with each other in respect to weight, and current everywhere by virtue of universal confidence in them, though bearing the symbols preferred by the nation that mints them, is one of the dreams and hopes of economists, that will be realized in some
"Fair future day
Which Fate shall brightly gild."
Gold and silver are sufficiently portable for all the purposes of modern Money. Their weight is little relatively to their value. A thousand dollars in gold are not indeed carried so easily as a Bill of Exchange or a Bank-note; and expedients are easily adopted, and have been in use since the days of the Romans (really since the later days of the Assyrians), by which the transfer in place of large masses of coin is for the most part obviated; and these expedients have all been explained at length in the foregoing chapter on Commercial Credits. But for the ordinary exchanges for which they are designed, gold and silver coins are portable enough. The writer has carried across the ocean, incased in a glove-finger and borne in a vest-pocket, a troy pound of English sovereigns, worth about $230, scarcely conscious of their weight though easily reassured of their presence by a touch of the hand. The experience of those countries, like France and Germany, in which the Money has been and is still mostly metallic, has not pronounced it onerous on account of its weight; and, at any rate, it is better to accept all the other immense advantages of gold and silver money, together with some inconvenience as to weight, if one chooses to insist on that, than to adopt substitutes every way inferior as money, except that they are lighter in our purses. They are unfortunately "lighter" in other respects also.
Moreover, gold and silver differ from jewels and most other precious things, in that they are divisible without any loss of value into pieces of any required size. The aggregate of pieces is worth as much as the mass and the mass as much as the pieces. This is a great advantage in Money, because for the convenience of business a considerable variety of coins is required, and the proper proportion of each kind to the rest is a matter of trial, and if any kind be minted in excess of the demand nothing more is required than to remint in other denominations, and the whole value is thus saved to the country in the most convenient form.
Then, gold and silver are easily impressible by any stamp which the Government chooses to put upon them. Indeed in their natural state they are too soft to retain long the impress of the die. Accordingly for coinage purposes they are always alloyed with another metal, chiefly copper, since by a chemical law whenever two such metals are mixed together the compound is harder than either of the two ingredients. Most of the Nations now use in their gold and silver coins 1⁄10 alloy, but England still adheres to her ancient rule of 1⁄12 only. So compounded coins receive readily and retain for a long time with sharp distinctness the legend and other devices chosen for them to bear. In monarchical countries the head of the reigning sovereign is usually stamped upon the current coins; in all countries national emblems of some sort; quite recently some of the coins of the United States have been made to bear the appropriate legend "In God we trust"; so that patriotic and even religious associations are connected with the national Money. Although the alloys harden the coins, yet after long usage they will lose a part of their weight by abrasion, and Governments usually indicate a short weight, after coming to which the coins are no longer a legal tender for debts. Thus an English sovereign weighs 5 pennyweights 3 171⁄623 grains, containing 113 1⁄623 grains of fine gold, and when it falls below 5 pennyweights 2¾ grains, it loses its legal-tender character.
Lastly, gold and silver when coined into Money are objects of great beauty. This is no slight recommendation of these metals for the money of the world. They are clean. They are beautiful. People like to see them, and to handle them, and to have them. Their perfectly circular form, the device covering the whole piece, the milled and fluted edges, the patriotic emblem, whatever it be, the religious or other legend, and their bright color, are all elements in their beauty. The educating power over the young of a good coinage well kept up, æsthetically, historically, and commercially, is a matter of consequence to any country. A whole people handling constantly such money cannot fail to receive a wholesome development thereby. The new German coinage, for example, in contrast with the old moneys of the German States, furnishes a good illustration of all this. The new German coins from highest to lowest are very beautiful, and have already tended and will tend more and more, other things being equal, to a true German nationality.