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Updated: May 23, 2025
This mode of reduction, however, is possible with a national value-currency only. A specie-currency is incapable of regulation. The same may be said of any currency based on specie.
Thus it appears that the results of a bank-note currency are similar to those of a specie-currency, but as much more disastrous as its expansions and contractions are greater and more sudden.
These defects are not pointed out for the purpose of preventing the adoption of a specie-currency. There is no probability of such a currency ever prevailing in this country, except in the neighborhood of the mines, and there only for a time.
Nevertheless, a specie-currency is advocated even by those who carefully avoid handling it, and who would be the last to consent to such a reduction of the currency as its exclusive use would require, a confusion of mind due to the fact that the difference between value and wealth is not always distinctly recognized.
Indeed, a specie-currency in the presence of bank-notes is an impossibility, because the notes proclaim their own inferiority; consequently, the specie is retained and the notes circulated. Yet, the operations of the mint are continued, with the avowed object of creating a specie currency. This practice is, however, of some use.
A specie-currency may be converted into ear-rings, but it is no longer a currency; it may be buried in iron pots, or locked in iron safes, but it is not then a currency; it may be exported to foreign lands, but it is not there a currency until reauthorized. Currencies, properly speaking, are ideas clothed in words, the words of a nation, otherwise called laws.
The merchandise attached to a specie-currency is an evidence of former barbarism, a remain of the primitive practice of barter, an incongruous element, tending to impede rather than to assist circulation, to destroy rather than to create a currency. But is a value-currency possible?
Of a specie-currency the defect is want of constancy. This defect, derived from its material element, has a particular and a general aspect. The particular is the reduction of the quantity of metal in coins. The Roman money-unit the as consisted originally of a pound of bronze; that of England the pound sterling and that of France the livre consisted each of a pound of silver.
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