19h Ma:
Bieratuists at home have hailed so much enthusiasm the conversion of Mr. Leonard Courtney, MLP., that a short sketch of the article in the April number of the Nineteenth Century, in which he announced that conversion to the world, will not improbably be interesting, By some his article has been described as a merciless dissection and refutation of Mr. Gladstone's recent defence of monometallism, but it is nothing of the kind, and Mr. Courtney allows that "the concurrent use of gold and silver at a fixed ratio becomes a question of expediency," and he is still ready even to permit Mr. Giffen to denounce bimetallism as a scandal. he faith which Mr. Courtney now professes is enunciated in the last paragraphs of his article: "Ihe question of action must be determined by a balance of divergent considerations, Five years ago I joined with my friends in deprecating any attempt to establish an international agreement for the free coinage of both gold and silver as standard money. Ihave advanced with further experience and reflection to the belief that such an agreement is to be desired, and that it could be accomplished' with the minimum of change and with great advantage to the empire and the world on the conditions I have suggested."
Tu giving his reasons for his change of front, a change of front that is going on among. British monometallists more rapidly than is sometimes realised, Mr. Courtney begins by praising the play and power, and the perfection of form, in Mr. Gladstone's speech. He points out that it was an eminently Conservative speech, and that Mr. Gladstone was quite right to insist on the sacredness of the contracts comprised in our pecuniary obligations to one another, which are based upon a certain unit of weight of a single metal. But circumstances alter cases and as our duty to pay our obligations in gold has been made more onerous by legislation on the Continent, it may be missible to make it less onerous by legislation at home. This might be a rather dangerous doctrine, it seems to us. A. contracted fifteen years ago to pay B. one hundred ounces of gold, when that amount of gold was worth one hundred and fifty-five ounces silver. A. is called upon to repay when it will cost him, say, two hundred and twenty ounces of silver to procure the one hundred ounces of gold. Is he justified in asking for legislation that will enable him to get quits now with one hundred and fifty-five ounces Mr. Courtney sees the difficulty of this, for he says: "If it was proposed that on a given day silver should be as available as gold for the payment of debts at the ratio of fifteen and a half to one, the market ratio being now unch higher, every creditor whu could get in his debts immediately would do so, and buy silver and other commodities (silver pre-eminently) for the rise, The form of the catastrophe might not be exactly as anticipated, but I admit that a mad confusion, a dislocation—we might say a wreckage—of the financial world would probably follow. Che proposal is, moreover, open to the objection—which in my mind is fatal—that it would give an immediate and direct bonus to the Silver Ring.
We pass over Mr. Courtney's impeachment of gold as a stable standard and his arguments that it is gold that has appreciated, not silver that has depreciated, because these things may be now considered accepted. The people in a balloon that is going up see all the earth falling away from them and are not conscious that they are moving but the people on the earth see the balloon going up. So the people in the gold balloon see silver and all other commodities going down from them, while the world of these commodities sees the gold going up. Gold, then, has appreciated, and silver has remained fairly steady as compared with commodities generally; bnt this, it might be argued from Mr, Courtney's figures, is not due to legislation, to demonetization of silver, or to the dissolution of the Latin Union, but to the fact that while the production of gold was £27,815,400 in the quinquennial period 1851-55, it was only. £22,640,000 in the quinquennial period 1886-90; whereas, while the produetion of silver was 886,155 kilos (a year) in 1851-55, it was 4,731,000 kilos in 1892, But what is wanted is not a silver standard instead of a gold standard: "the ideal standard of recent years should have been a compound of the two metals. Like the gri-iron pendulum, whose parts expand up and down leaving the centre ofoscillation unchanged, a properly chosen unit of money, part gold and part silver, might have maintained a truly stationary value." The use, however, of money based on a unit which is a mixture of two metals is too ingenious a suggestion ever to be generally adopted. Mr. Courtney still joins with those who have hesitated, and do hesitate, to, accept the establishment and extension of the Latin Union; and this is his suggestion "Assuming that the existing market value of silver showed a ratio between it and gold f something between twenty-three and twenty-four to one,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.