dam was, in fact, merely the reckoning name for Spanish doubloons, which retained their full weight by lying idly in the bank vaults, while the circulating coins became thinner from hard rubbing against the outer world. And as for the African idealists we have to abandon them to their fate until critical travelers will tell us more about them[1] The French assignat could be called an almost ideal money in Steuart's sense: "National property. Assignation of 100 francs." To be sure, the use-value which the assignation was supposed to represent, namely, the confiscated land, was indicated here, but the quantitative definition of the unit of measure was forgotten and "the franc" became a meaningless word. How much or how little land the assignation franc represented depended on the results of the public auctions. In practice, however, the assignation franc circulated as a token of value of silver money and its depreciation was, therefore, measured by this silver standard.
The period of the suspension of cash payments by the Bank of England was hardly more fruitful of war-bulletins than of money theories. The depreciation of bank notes and the rise of the market price of gold
- ↑ On the occasion of the last commercial crisis the ideal African money received loud praise from certain English quarters, after its seat was this time moved from the coast to the heart of Barbary. The freedom of the Berbers from commercial and industrial crises was ascribed to the ideal unit of measure of their bars. Would it not have been simpler to say that trade and industry are the conditio sine qua non of commercial and industrial crises?
