CHAPTER XXI. NATIONAL SYSTEM OF CURRENCY AND EXCHANGE REQUIRED.
Inadequacy and Absurdity of present Medium of Exchange—Necessity for new National Currency for Home Trade—Example from Iron Currency of Sparta—Labour Notes of Guernsey—Gold and Silver mere Commodities—All four Reforms must be combined.
In this chapter we shall elucidate the remaining two propositions of the League, on the important complementary reforms necessary to be introduced for the expulsion of human slavery from the face of the land, and the full emancipation of industry from the trammels of a false and pernicious system of Currency and Exchange. The sixth and seventh resolutions read as follows:—
“That the National Currency should be based on real, consumable wealth, or on the bona fide credit of the State, and not upon the variable and uncertain amount of scarce metals; because a currency depending on such a basis, however suitable in past times, or as a measure of value in present international commerce, has now become, by the increase of population and wealth, wholly inadequate to perform the functions of equitably representing and distributing that wealth; thereby rendering all commodities liable to perpetual fluctuation in price, as those metals happen to be more or less plentiful in any country; increasing to an enormous extent the evils inherent in usury, and in the banking and funding systems (in support of which a legitimate function of the law—the PROTECTION of property—is distorted into an instrument for the CREATION of property to a large amount for the benefit of a small portion of society belonging to what are called vested interests); because, from its liability to become locally or nationally scarce or in excess, that equilibrium which should be maintained between the production and consumption of wealth is destroyed; because, being of intrinsic value in itself, it fosters a vicious trade in money, and a ruinous practice of commercial gambling and speculation; and, finally, because, under the present system of society, it has become confessedly the ‘root of all evil’ and the main support of that unholy worship of Mammon which now so extensively prevails, to the supplanting of all true religion, natural and revealed.
“That in order to facilitate the transfer of property or service, and the mutual interchange of wealth among the people, to equalise the demand and supply of commodities, to encourage consumption as well as production, and to render it as easy to sell as to buy, it is an important duty of the State to institute in every town and city public marts or stores for the reception of all kinds of exchangeable goods, to be valued by disinterested officers appointed for the purpose, either upon a corn or a labour standard; the depositors to receive symbolic notes representing the value of their deposits, such notes to be made legal currency throughout the country, enabling their owners to draw from the public stores to an equivalent amount, thereby gradually displacing the present reckless system of competitive trading and shopkeeping,—a system which, however necessary, or unavoidable in the past, now produces a monstrous amount of evil, by maintaining a large class living on the profits made by the mere sale of goods, on the demoralising principle of buying cheap and selling dear, totally regardless of the ulterior effects of that policy upon society at large and the true interests of humanity.”
Add to the gigantic fraud of the land-usurpers the hardly less monstrous fraud of the money-changers in daring to make two particular metals (falsely called precious) the sole basis of that currency which is the life’s blood of society, without which exchanges cannot be safely effected, and you see capped before you the climax of iniquity. These precious metals being articles of commerce—mere merchandise, like iron or cotton, at the same time that they are made the sole basis of our instruments of exchange, it follows, as a necessary consequence, that whoever can, by commerce, monopolise these precious metals can, by so doing, monopolise at the same time the basis of our currency, and so leave us without any instruments of exchange at all, but what may be convertible, upon their own fraudulent terms, into those two favoured metals, which their commercial wealth has enabled them to monopolise.
The false principle at the root of our present system is, that money or the medium of exchange should be itself a thing of intrinsic value. By this false principle there must be an expenditure of labour equal to what is required to produce the equivalents it exchanges for; and besides the absurdity of such misplaced, because wholly useless, labour, it is manifestly ridiculous to suppose that any one commodity (more especially an exceedingly scarce one, like gold) can ever be obtained in sufficient abundance to represent adequately all other commodities which may be produced ad libitum, to any extent demanded by consumption, and which, without the intervention of gold at all, might be interchanged from hand to hand, in one single week, to an amount equal to fifty times the value of all the gold in the country. It is like supposing a part of a thing to be equal to the whole. Gold may be a good measure of value, and, as such, is perfectly unobjectionable; but as an exclusive representative of value, or as the sole basis of representation (which our present laws have virtually made it, by constituting it the sole basis of our circulating medium), it is to our productive and trading population what a single blanket or a single suit of clothes would be, applied to the use of a whole family consisting of divers persons of all ages and sizes. The strongest and most important members of the political family get the best share of the blanket; the others get the least, and some get none at all. As well might the garments of a dwarf be expected to fit a giant, as well might our legislators attempt to restore a full-grown bird to the egg whence it was hatched, as attempt to tie down the population and commerce of this great country to the Procrustean bed of Peel’s monetary system as established by his laws of 1819 and 1844. That system alone, were there no other causes in operation, must sooner or later produce a convulsion in this country, if it be not speedily unmade by wiser and better men than its authors. To pretend that the rights of property exist in a country where such a monetary system coexists with private ownership of the soil, is a monstrous perversion of language. It is not the rights of property, but the wrongs of robbery, that these land and money laws tend to conservate.
The prime necessity of man is to live: he cannot live without corn, unless in the lowest condition of the savage; but he may not only live, but live in comfort, without gold or silver. They are not the “staffs of life,” however in our ignorance we may bow the knee to them as to graven images. We invest them with supreme power, as superstition invests its idols. The ancient fabulist who sketched the character of Midas seems to have written, by anticipation, a satire on modern credulity. Midas enjoyed the fatal gift of turning all he touched into gold; his food was transmuted into the precious metal, and starvation taught him that corn was the true standard of all that was physically valuable. Midas was the prototype of modern bullionists and moneymongers. The Bank of England can now pave its floors with gold; but what does it avail to the people? And yet was it not the industry of the people that raised the ore from the mines, and brought it hither by the sale or exchange of their labour, sustained by corn, the produce of labour in another form? What was the intrinsic value of gold to Midas?