No more than an invariable standard of friendship or love.  Value is, in fact, a purely ideal relation.  All this talk about an invariable dollar which shall be like the bushel measure or the yard stick is the merest claptrap.  The fact that gold men stoop to such language goes far to prove that their contention is wrong.  The argument violates the very first principle of mental philosophy, in that it applies the fixed relations of space, weight, and time to the operations of the mind.  Would you say a bushel of discontent or eighteen inches of friendship?  Men who compare the dollar to the pound weight or yard stick are talking just that unscientifically.  Invariable value being an impossibility, and an invariable standard of value a correlative impossibility, all we can do is to select those commodities which vary the least and use them as a measure for other things; but you will not find in any economic writer that any metal is a fixed standard.  And this brings me to consider that singular piece of folly which furnishes the basis of so much monometallist literature, namely, that gold is less variable in value than silver, and that one metal as a basis varies less than two.  Some of our statesmen have got themselves into such a condition of mind on this point as to really believe that, while all other products of human labor are changing in value, gold alone is gifted with the great attribute of God—­immutability.  It is sheer blasphemy.  It is conclusively proved, and by many different lines of reasoning, that silver is many times more stable in value than gold.

=I never heard such a proposition in my life!  How on earth can it be proved that silver, as things now stand, has not changed in value more than gold?=

By the simplest of all processes.  If we were in a mining country, I could easily prove it to you by the observed facts of geology, mineralogy, and metallurgy; but that is perhaps too remote and scientific, so we will take the range of prices since silver was demonetized.  Of course you have seen the various tables, such as Soetbeer’s and Mulhall’s.  Take their figures, or, better still, take those of the United States Statistical Abstract, and you will find the following facts demonstrated: 

In February, 1873, a ten-ounce bar of uncoined silver sold in New York city for $13 in gold, or $14.82 in greenbacks.  To-day the ten-ounce bar sells there for $6.90.

“Awful depreciation,” isn’t it?  “Debased money,” and all that sort of thing.  But hold on.  Let us see how it is with other things.  For prices in the first half of 1873 we will take the United States Abstract, and for present prices to-day’s issue of the New York Tribune.  Wheat then was $1.40 in New York city, so our silver bar would have brought ten and four-sevenths bushels; to-day wheat is “unsteady” in the near neighborhood of 64 cents, and our silver bar would buy ten and five-sixths bushels.  No. 2 red is the standard in both cases.