182

ESSAYS IN PERSUASION

PART

predominant importance; and there followedsilver’s long hegemony (except for a certainrevival of the influence of gold in Roman Con-stantinople), chequered by imperfectly success-ful attempts at gold-and-silver bimetallism,especially in the eighteenth century and thefirst half of the nineteenth, and only concludedby the final victory of gold during the fifty yearsbefore the war.

Dr. Freud relates that there are peculiarreasons deep in our subconsciousness why goldin particular should satisfy strong instincts andserve as a symbol. The magical properties,with which Egyptian priestcraft anciently im-bued the yellow metal, it has never altogetherlost. Yet, whilst gold as a store of value hasalways had devoted patrons, it is, as the solestandard of purchasing power, almost a parvenu.In 1914 gold had held this position in GreatBritain de jure over less than a hundred years(though de facto for more than two hundred),and in most other countries over less than sixty.For except during rather brief intervals goldhas been too scarce to serve the needs of theworld’s principal medium of currency. Gold is,and always has been, an extraordinarily scarcecommodity. A modern liner could conveyacross the Atlantic in a single voyage all thegold which has been dredged or mined in seventhousand years. At intervals of five hundredor a thousand years a new source of supply hasbeen discovered—the latter half of the nine-teenth century was one of these epochs—and a