divisible, as both convenient and safe, the precious metals challenge
superiority over every other product; and accordingly every contract
and every debt is resolvable into gold and silver. From this fact, the
reader will see at once the prodigious significance of those materials
in the economy of trade, and the prime necessity that they should be
not only uniform in value, but so equally distributed that they may be
easily attainable when needed. Every change in their value is a virtual
change in the value of the vast variety of obligations which are
measured and liquidated by them; and every apprehension of their
scarcity or disappearance, by whatever cause excited, is an apprehension
of embarrassment on the part of all those who have debts to pay or to
receive.

But it happens that this standard is not an accurate standard. It does
not _stand_, while other things alone move, but moves itself; its value
is changeable,--fluctuating from time to time according 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