CURRENCY AND FARMING. 13 



purchase of goods, and all at once we find a change from 

 redundancy to a healthy equilibrium. So, when there is a 

 stringency, when gold becomes dear, it will be diverted 

 from the making of ornaments and fancy uses, and used for 

 money ; and just as prices rose in the other case, just so now 

 they will fall. And so, by a law of adjustment just as 

 beautiful as that of the tides and as inevitable, there is not 

 any possibility of a redundancy or stringency of the money 

 market where gold and silver — that is, where the money of 

 the world — are used. 



What, then, is the meaning of these panics and financial 

 revulsions? Are these meaningless? By no means. We 

 find them occurring all over the world, from time to time. 

 We find, for instance, that a man in Amherst, say, is unable 

 to pay his merchant ; he, in turn, is unable to pay the whole- 

 sale dealer in New York or Boston, and so the consequences 

 extend, and finally result in a panic, the influence of which 

 may extend all over the world. But how do these panics 

 come ? They are possible only because we have put some- 

 thing else in the place of money — undertaken to use the 

 shadow of the thing, and make that do the work of the sub- 

 stance. That is the only reason. Financial panics never 

 have occurred — from the nature of the case they never can 

 occur — where the money of the country is genuine money 

 current all over the globe. They all come from no other 

 reason than as I have said : we have got the shadow under- 

 taking to do the work of the substance, which means, in plain 

 language, that we have been telling lies on a large scale — 

 and it is not profitable to lie. 



Now, this being the case, it leads us to notice the important 

 difference between money and currency ; that is, between 

 money as I have explained it and the currency as we actually 

 have it. We have got a certain currency — certain papers 

 printed on both sides — which we call money ; and the trouble 

 is, we are undertaking to make it do the work of money, and 

 we cannot succeed. This currency, I say, is not money, is 

 not a standard of value, because, in the first place, it has not 

 got any value in itself; it does not cost anything to get it, and 

 therefore cannot be a standard of value. Moreover, what 

 sort of a standard is that which stretches out at the beck of 



