Fors Clavigera (Volume 5 of 8) / Letters to the workmen and labourers of Great Britain

by John Ruskin

Let us understand then, in the outset, the moral difference between a national debt and a national store.

A national debt, like any other, may be honestly incurred in case of need, and honestly paid in due time. But if a man should be ashamed to borrow, much more should a people; and if a father holds it his honour to provide for his children, and would be ashamed to borrow from them, and leave, with his blessing, his note of hand, for his grandchildren to pay, much more should a nation [[285]]be ashamed to borrow, in any case, or in any manner; and if it borrow at all, it is at least in honour bound to borrow from living men, and not indebt itself to its own unborn brats. If it can’t provide for them, at least let it not send their cradles to the pawnbroker, and pick the pockets of their first breeches.

A national debt, then, is a foul disgrace, at the best. But it is, as now constituted, also a foul crime. National debts paying interest are simply the purchase, by the rich, of power to tax the poor. Read carefully the analysis given of them above, [Letter VIII., p. 7].

The financial operations of the St. George’s Company will be the direct reverse of these hitherto approved arrangements. They will consist in the accumulation of national wealth and store, and therefore in distribution to the poor, instead of taxation of them; and the fathers will provide for, and nobly endow, not steal from, their children and children’s children.

My readers, however, will even yet, I am well aware, however often I have reiterated the statement to them, be unable to grasp the idea of a national store, as an existing possession. They can conceive nothing but a debt;—nay, there are many of them who have a confused notion that a debt is a store!

The store of the St. George’s Company, then, is to be primarily of food; next, of materials for clothing and covert; next, of books and works of art,—food, clothes, books, and works of art being all good, and every poisonous [[286]]condition of any of them destroyed. The food will not be purveyed by the Borgia, nor the clothing dyed by Deianira, nor the Scriptures written under dictation of the Devil instead of God.

The most simply measurable part of the store of food and clothing will be the basis of the currency, which will be thus constituted.

The standard of value will be a given weight or measure of grain, wine, wool, silk, flax, wood, and marble; all answered for by the government as of fine and pure quality, variable only within narrow limits.

The grain will be either wheat, oats, barley, rice, or maize; the wine of pure vintage, and not less than ten years old;[4] the wool, silk, and flax of such standard as can be secured in constancy; the wood, seasoned oak and pine; and for fuel in log and faggot, with finest wood and marble for sculpture. The penny’s worth, florin’s worth, ducat’s worth, and hundred ducats’ worth of each of these articles will be a given weight or measure of them, (the penny roll of our present breakfast table furnishing some notion of what, practically, the grain standard will become.) Into the question of equivalent value I do not enter here; it will be at once determined practically as soon as the system is in work. Of these articles the government will always have in its [[287]]possession as much as may meet the entire demand of its currency in circulation. That is to say, when it has a million in circulation, the million’s worth of solid property must be in its storehouses: as much more as it can gather, of course; but never less. So that, not only, for his penny, florin, ducat, or hundred-ducat note, a man may always be certain of having his pound, or ton, or pint, or cask, of the thing he chooses to ask for, from the government storehouses, but if the holders of the million of currency came in one day to ask for their money’s worth, it would be found ready for them in one or other form of those substantial articles. Consequently, the sum of the circulating currency being known, the minimum quantity of store will be known. The sum of the entire currency, in and out of circulation, will be given annually on every note issued (no issues of currency being made but on the first day of the year), and in each district, every morning the quantities of the currency in and out of circulation in that district will be placarded at the doors of the government district bank.

The metallic currency will be of absolutely pure gold and silver, and of those metals only; the ducat and half-ducat in gold, the florin, penny, halfpenny, and one-fifth of penny in silver; the smaller coins being beat thin and pierced, the halfpenny with two, the one-fifth of penny with five, apertures.[5] I believe this double-centime [[288]]will be as fine a divisor as I shall need. The florin will be worth tenpence; the ducat, twenty florins.