but even at that best it falls far short of an imaginable ideal. It
undergoes spasmodic and irregular cheapening through new discoveries
of gold, and at any time it may undergo very extensive and sudden
and disastrous depreciation through the discovery of some way of
transmuting less valuable elements. The liability to such
depreciations introduces an undesirable speculative element into the
relations of debtor and creditor. When, on the one hand, there is
for a time a check in the increase of the available stores of gold,
or an increase in the energy applied to social purposes, or a
checking of the public security that would impede the free exchange
of credit and necessitate a more frequent production of gold in
evidence, then there comes an undue appreciation of money as against
the general commodities of life, and an automatic impoverishment of
the citizens in general as against the creditor class. The common
people are mortgaged into the bondage of debt. And on the other
hand an unexpected spate of gold production, the discovery of a
single nugget as big as St. Paul's, let us say--a quite possible
thing--would result in a sort of jail delivery of debtors and a
financial earthquake.

It has been suggested by an ingenious thinker that it is possible
to use as a standard of monetary value no substance whatever, but
instead, force, and that value might be measured in units of energy.
An excellent development this, in theory, at any rate, of the
general idea of the modern State as kinetic and not static; it
throws the old idea of the social order and the new into the
sharpest antithesis. The old order is presented as a system of
institutions and classes ruled by men of substance; the new, of
enterprises and interests led by men of power.