XIX.: The nation being in debt to foreigners, is not a reason for altering the standard.

39. I am now come in the last place, to consider a pretence for debasing the standard of money, on which much stress is laid by some persons, viz.

“As we are a nation indebted to foreigners, have great plenty of gold coins, and no silver coins but what are much below the standard; should we lower gold, we should undervalue our own treasure, and pay our foreign creditors more than we received from them; and no injustice would be done, should we make gold the standard, and raise the silver.”

In this argument, many different things are artfully blended together, that the main design of cheating our foreign creditors might appear the less conspicuous, and the less shocking. All the above various pretences have already, in effect, been fully answered; but because of the importance of the subject, I shall here speak again to some of these points.

1. If the intention be simply to transfer the standard from silver to gold, why are the silver coins to be altered? Doth not the altering of them, equally alter the size of the standard, commit equally the same injustice with respect to property, whether you call the new standard by the name of gold, or by the name of silver? And hath all the pother made about gold being a standard, any other aim or design, than to deceive us by a mere jingle of words: Or, is it possible, that any can be so hoodwinked as to believe themselves, that gold either is or ever can be the standard, whilst it continues to be so dear, and whilst all men do and continue to reckon by silver?

2. It is a fact too notorious, that we have no silver coins left, but what are wore much below the standard; and that even these are at length grown so scarce, as to call aloud for a speedy supply. But one part of the argument grafted upon this misfortune, viz. “that by lowering directly the price of gold, we should undervalue our own treasure,” hath been fully answered in the preceding; and there it hath been also shewed, that the lowering of gold directly or openly, would be easier or less detrimental to individuals, than the doing it, as it were covertly, and clandestinely, by debasing the silver standard; and enough hath been already said, to shew the vanity, injustice, and enormity of such a measure. Those also, who would persuade us that in reality and practice, gold is our standard, because with us more payments, or to a much greater value, are made in gold than in silver coins; have been likewise. I think, fully answered. And I might go yet farther, and insist, that although our silver coins were grown yet scarcer, or were even annihilated; as long as silver continued to be plenty in the rest of the world, and as long as we continued our old method of reckoning in pounds sterling; those old abolished coins would continue still to be our standard; and their substitutes, whether they be gold, copper, or whatever else, would have their value according to that proportion, which given quantities of them bore to the quantity of silver formerly put into those old coins, into whose places they had succeeded. Nothing could be really the standard, but that which all men called the standard; and there could be no other way of estimating the value of the substitute, than by the value of the thing to which it was referred. Settled ideas, annexed to the names of known things, are not to be eradicated, or even altered, whilst the things themselves continue unaltered. If circumstances did so require, which is not the case at present, nor likely to be so in ages yet to come, the standard of money might be transferred, from silver to some other material; but, to make this transfer complete and effectual, it would be necessary to lay aside the old names used in reckonings and accounts, and to substitute new ones in their stead: To transfer the standard of money from one material to another, was the thing itself proper and requisite, is not so easy to be accomplished, as some late projectors seem to imagine. But to proceed.