204 Wisconsin State Agricultural Society. 
and indeed in the language of the sturdiest bullionists who discuss 
the subjects, however they may manage to conceal it, even from 
themselves, this one thing, viz., that the value of gold follows the 
same law of supply and demand that the value of other commodi¬ 
ties do—and that this value varies largely in different localities, and 
in the same locality at different times. Few doctrines are more 
fallacious than that of the stability of the value of gold, and few 
fallacies are more wide-spread and more mischevious. It comes 
from the habit prevalent even among the well-instructed and those 
who theoretically know better of practically confounding price 
with value. It will not be difficult to show that the purchasing 
power of gold —and this is what we mean by value—within the last 
six years, has varied by an imperceptible fraction less than that of 
our national paper currency even when the latter has been under 
unnecessary and unnatural disabilities. 
Commissioner Wells, in his report of 1869, (page 52.) gives a 
tabular statement of the comparative prices of a list of eleven staple 
articles in the Philadelphia market on July 1,1857, and July 30,1869. 
The average decrease in the price of these eleven articles, reckoned in 
currency, is 30.9 per cent., or currency values had increased 45 per 
cent.,while the decrease in the premium on gold for the same time was 
only 11 per cent. If the prices are reduced to a gold standard, and 
if we may take these articles or representative of general prices, as 
Mr. Wells obviously intends, we shall find that the value of gold 
in these two years varied 40 per cent. Take another example. 
Amasa Walker, in his work on the Science of Wealth, (page 488,) 
gives the comparative prices of a list of seventeen articles for the 
four successive years 1862 to 1866 inclusive, in the Boston market 
for the month of October. These articles, as he says, “ are of do¬ 
mestic produce, not directly affected by custom or excise charges. 11 
Taking these as representative of general values, we learn that the 
advance in the whole four years amounts to 141 per cent., while 
the premium on gold in the same time has advanced only 11.5 per 
cent. Reducing everything to a gold standard we find that the 
value of gold had fallen nearly 53 per cent, in four years. In other 
words whatever you might have purchased for a gold dollar in 1862, 
you would have been obliged to pay $2.13 for the same article in 
1865. By the same table we learn that from October 1864, to October, 
1865, while the premium on gold fell 30 per cent., general prices rose 
