64 



W. G. Langzvorthy Taylor 



serve," Political Science Quarterly, June, 1896; Farrer, Studies in Cur- 

 rency, ch. XIII ; Report of the Monetary Commission, pp. 138-45. 



Silver in India. Cf. Meade article supra; Russell, International Mone- 

 tary Conferences, chs. VI-IX ; E. S. Meade, " The Fall in the Value of 

 Silver since 1873," Journal of Political Economy, June, 1897; Carlisle, "His- 

 torical Changes in the Monetary Standard," Journal of Political Economy, 

 June, 1899; J. B. Clark, "After Effect of Free Coinage," Political Sci- 

 ence Quarterly, September, 1896; W. Lexis, "The Present Monetary 

 Situation," Economic Studies (Amer. Ec. Assn.), October, 1896. 



Ill 



The commod- 

 ity standard 

 must be aban- 

 doned in the 



JUSTICE FOR DEBTORS 



§1. The term "idealistic" may be employed to designate the 

 attempts to find out what is an equal return by the debtor to the 

 creditor — a species of speculation instigated by persons who are 

 not satisfied either with existing monetary laws and practices or 

 with the propositions for materialistic standards. They say that, 

 search for one as a matter of experience, an equal amount of commodities does 



which will 



insure an uot spcll the Same value : the return to the creditor of an amount 



turn!" ^^' of money which will buy the same number of bushels of corn 

 and wheat, pounds of iron, ounces of pepper, spring bonnets, and 

 quarts of milk is not a scientifically correct restitution. For it 

 may happen that, if Easter Sunday is a rainy day, spring bonnets 

 will not have as much value as if the weather were good; if there 

 is a good crop of potatoes, they will not have the utility, eco- 

 . nomically speaking, that they would if the crop were bad; the 

 effort to produce a ton of iron, five years from now, may be 

 one-half what it is to-day ; and the substitution in the arts of 

 •aluminum for iron may render the latter metal ineligible as a 

 member of the standard group. Consequently, the selected heap 

 of commodities will bear very dift'erent value at the due date 

 from what it had when the debt was contracted. These con- 

 siderations, exaggerated a little for the sake of argument, seem to 

 weaken every proposition for bimetallism, or other materialistic 

 means of allaying recurrent insurrections of the debtor class by 

 an intelligent operation upon the circulation. 



At first thought, it would appear that an investigation into the 



178 



