TEANSACTIOIsS OF SECTION F. 71.1 



The following Papers were read : — 



1. The Postulates of the Standard. By WiLLiAJi Warrand Carlile, M.A. 



Professor Walkers exposition of the manner in which the standard substance 

 comes to measure values in his ' Money Trade and Industry ' shows the i'allacy of 

 the current view that any commodity can measure the ^alue of any or of all 

 others. We find, on the contrary, that the ])ostulate of the whole process is this, 

 that there must be a general desire for the substance which becomes the standard. 

 Should this general desire cease to operate, the value-measuring process would 

 cease also. This general desire must therefore be an insatiable desire. How it 

 Ijecanie so is a question that it is not proposed to enter on at present, but rather to 

 look at the fact in some of its bearings. In connection with the Tabular Standard 

 it seems clear that the natural gold standard must be, all the time, the basis of the 

 prices whose average forms it. Being a mere secondary product, it could never be 

 substituted for the primary. The conception of reality or objectivity depends 

 upon human intercourse. Such sensations only give the impression of reality as 

 are capable of exact comparison as between man and man. This applies also to 

 the conception of value. For such exact comparison, however, a common meeting- 

 ground for human desires is needed. This is furnished by the existence of one 

 substance which is the general goal of industrial eil'ort. The Austrian theory of 

 decreasing degrees of utility ignores this. It has some application to expenditure 

 on immediate consumption, but only a forced and unnatural one to business sales 

 and purchases. 



Though one must begin with the central fact of an insatiable desire for the 

 standard substance, the next fact with which we are struck is its imlimited re- 

 placeability, for the purposes of money, by other substances. If a man has a 

 document conveying to him the immediate right to gold on demand, the chances 

 are a hundred to one that he will never ask for the gold itself at all. The 

 document will serve all his purposes quite as well. Thus an immense mass of 

 substitutes for gold comes into existence. But in all theories of demand and 

 supply fluctuations in the supply of substitutes are held to affect the ^alue of the 

 original commodity just as much as fluctuations in its own supply; and so with 

 tlie standard. The more completely inviolable, therefore, the gold standard 

 is maintained by legislation, the more eftective do these documents become as sub- 

 stitutes for gold, and the more, consequently, is the volume of money increased. 

 This may be considered in connection with Jevons' metaphors of the two 

 cisterns connected by a pipe, and of the two intersecting lines representing gold 

 and silver respectively. Tlie modern system connects all commodities by pipes 

 into one great cistern called money, and neutralises all fluctuations. It really 

 fulfils the ideal of the framers of systems of multiple tender. As a product of 

 evolution, showing an interesting system of adaptation of means to ends, it is 

 comparable to the human ear or the human eye. 



2. Some Notes on the Output of Coal from the Scottish Coalfields. 

 By Robert W. Dron, A.M.Inst.C.E. 



During the last few years there has been a growing feeling of uneasiness 

 regarding the duration of our coal supply, and there is at present a movement in 

 favour of a further inquiry as to the extent of the coal resources of Great 

 Britain. 



The following considerations regarding the Scottish coalfield are in most 

 cases applicable to the whole of Great Britain. 



The output of coal in Great Britain in the year 1660 was about 2,000,000 tons 

 per annum, and of that quantity Scotland probably produced about 250,000 tons. 

 Since then there has been a steady progression, until now the Scottish output 

 amounts to 31,142,612 tons per annum. The total quantity of coal which has 

 been worked in Scotland up to the present date may be estimated at 1,600 million 

 tons, and the quantity still to work at about 10,000 million tons. 



1901. " 3 c 



