“He will hide one of his skins; and then, when there will be only four in use, more goods still will be given for each, and he will be able to buy as much with two skins as he could buy to-night with three. Then he will begin to sell again; and, to raise the price of his goods, he will bring out the skin he laid by, and put it into circulation.”
“Then goods will be just the price they are to-night. But if he sells, the skins will come back to him.”[him.”]
“Yes; and then if he chooses to lay by two, goods will be dearer than ever, and he may play the same trick over again with a larger profit, till he gets all our goods into his hands in return for one skin.”
“What a shame!” cried Clara. “People will not let him do so, to be sure?”
“If they must have his goods, and cannot get any more money, they must submit; but it will not be for long. We must soon get more skins by some means or another. I do wish I had the fur cap they took from me when they gave me this horrible covering.” And he pulled off and threw away the badge cap which the tender mercy of the Emperor had allotted to him. His shaven head, however, could not bear the cold without it, and he was obliged to let Clara pick it up and put it on again.
“I always thought,” she said, “that it was a very fine thing for goods to be cheap,—and it has been a fine thing for father and me to-day; but yet it seems as if they ought to be dearer again to-morrow.”
“And they should be, if I could make them so. You see, my dear, there are two sorts of cheapness, one of which is a good thing, and the other not. When it costs less trouble and expense, for instance, to grow corn than it did before, people will exchange more corn for the same quantity of tea or cloth or money than they did before; and this cheapness is a good thing, because it is a sign of plenty. There is more corn, and no less tea or money. But when more corn is given for a less quantity of tea or money, not because there is more corn, but because the Emperor of China will not let us have so much tea, or the Emperor of Russia so much money as formerly, this kind of cheapness is a bad thing, because it is a token of scarcity. This was our case yesterday. We had a scarcity of skins, but no more goods of other kinds than usual.”
“And there was a scarcity of skins in two ways,” observed the thoughtful little girl. “When we have had more than we wanted to use as money, it answered very well to make leggings and mittens of them; but now we could not get mouse-skin mittens if we wished it ever so much.”
“Not without buying money with more goods than a pair of mittens can ever be worth.”
“I never heard of buying money before,” said Clara, laughing.