ESSAYS IN PERSUASION

PART

184

and stockings and tin boxes, have been swallowedby a single golden image in each country, whichlives underground and is not seen. Gold is outof sight—gone back again into the soil. Butwhen gods are no longer seen in a yellowpanoply walking the earth, we begin to rational-ise them; and it is not long before there isnothing left.

Thus the long age of Commodity Money hasat last passed finally away before the age ofRepresentative Money. Gold has ceased to bea coin, a hoard, a tangible claim to wealth, ofwhich the value cannot slip away so long as thehand of the individual clutches the materialstuff. It has become a much more abstractthing—-just a standard of value; and it onlykeeps this nominal status by being handed roundfrom time to time in quite small quantitiesamongst a group of Central Banks , on theoccasions when one of them has been inflatingor deflating its managed representative moneyin a different degree from what is appropriateto the behaviour of its neighbours. Even thehanding round is becoming a little old-fashioned,being the occasion of unnecessary travellingexpenses, and the most modern way, called“ear-marking,” is to change the ownershipwithout shifting the location. It is not a farstep from this to the beginning of arrangementsbetween Central Banks by which, without everformally renouncing the rule of gold, thequantity of metal actually buried in their vaultsmay come to stand, by a modern alchemy, for