Atlantic Monthly | Page 4

to the relation of supply and demand, and from place to place according to the perturbations of the trade of the world. Moreover, its very preeminence of function the universality and the durability of its worth--renders it peculiarly sensitive to accidental influences, or to influences outside of the usual workings of trade. A great war or revolution occurring anywhere, the loss by tempests or frosts of an important staple, such as wheat or cotton, the fall and reaction consequent upon some great speculative excitement, are all likely to produce enormous drains or sequestrations of this valuable material. When the revolt of 1848 broke out in Italy, every particle of specie disappeared as effectually as if it had been thrown into the Adriatic or the mouth of Vesuvius; when the corn crop failed in England in 1846, the Bank of England lost ten millions of dollars in gold in less than nine days, and the country five times that in about a month; and in our own late experiences, with three hundred millions of gold among the people, we have seen it so put away, that no charm or bait could allure it from its hiding-places.
Need we go any farther, then, than these simple truths, to lay our finger on the primal fact which underlies all financial embarrassments and panics? The mass of the transactions in commerce rests upon credit; the solvent of that credit is gold; and gold has not only a sliding scale of value, but is apt to disappear when most wanted. While business is moving on in the ordinary way, it is more than ample for every purpose; but the moment any event arises, such as a rapidly falling market, inducing hurried sales, or a drain of specie, disturbing the general confidence, everybody gets apprehensive, everybody calls upon everybody for payment, and everybody puts everybody off,--till a feeling of sauve qui peut becomes universal.
If there were no currency anywhere but a metallic currency, this liability to sudden revulsions would still hang over trade, provided credit and paper tokens of credit continued to be the media of exchanges; and the instinctive or experimental perception of this truth, combined with other motives, is what has led men to their various attempts to provide a money substitute for gold and silver. Lycurgus, in Sparta, found it, as he supposed, in stamped leather; but modern wisdom has preferred paper. The degree of success attained by Lycurgus we do not know; but of the success of the moderns we do know, by some one hundred and fifty years of recurring disaster. There are some steeds that cannot be ridden; they are so fractious and intractable, that, put whom you will upon their back, he is thrown, and invent what snaffle or breaking-bit you may, they will not be held to an equable or moderate pace. And of this sort, judging by the past attempts, is Paper Money. All the ingenuity and efforts of the most skillful trainers of the Old World, and of the most cunning jockeys of the New, have been tasked in vain to devise an effective discipline and curb for this impatient colt. Paper Money either refuses to be ridden, and runs rampant away, or, if any one succeed in mounting him for a time, he performs a journey like that which Don Quixote took on the back of the famous Cavalino, or Winged Horse. In imagination he ascended to the enchanted regions,--but in reality he was only dragged through alternate gusts of fire and of cold winds, to find the horse himself, in the end, a mere depository of squibs and crackers.
Paper money has been issued, for the most part, on the one or the other of two conditions, namely: as irredeemable, when it has been made to rest on the vague obligation of some government to pay it some time or other in property; or as convertible into gold and silver on demand. But under both conditions it seems to have been impossible to preserve it from excess and consequent depreciation. Nothing would appear to be safer and sounder, on the face of it, than a money-obligation backed by all the responsibility and property of a government; and yet we do not recall a single instance in which an irredeemable government-money has been issued, where it did not sooner or later swamp the government beyond all hope of its redemption. No virtue of statesmanship is proof against the temptation of creating money at will. Even where there has been a nominal convertibility on demand of the bills of government banks, they have worked badly in practice. In 1637, for instance, the monarch of Sweden established the Bank of Stockholm; yet in a little while its issues amounted to forty-eight millions of roubles, and their depreciation to ninety-six