has been robbed " by challenging, not the inference, but the premise. Thus the discussion has been shunted off from economic theory and turned into a controversy over the fact of "appreciation." This controversy has been, to a large extent, a mere war of words, because, by "appreciation" the monometallists mean one thing and the bimetallists, another. No one has yet provided a meaning for that much abused word acceptable to both parties. The bimetallists prove the appreciation of gold y the fall in prices. The monometallists reply that wages have risen, and hold that the fall in prices is due to progress in the arts. Some bimetallists, e. g., Leonard Courtney,[1] accept the distinction between a fall in prices through causes connected with gold and a fall through causes connected with commodities, but most of them assert that a "fall of prices" and "appreciation of gold" are synonymous expressions, and that, if progress cheapens other commodities, it ought justly to cheapen gold also. Generally speaking, bimetallists set up the "commodity standard " and monometallists, the " labor standard."
Others attempt to find the "just" standard in "marginal utility," "total utility," and so forth. On all sides it is tacitly assumed that a "just" standard must in some sense be an "invariable " standard; that is, a standard such that the principal of the debt when due should be equivalent in some way to the original loan. "All writers on the subject of money have agreed that uniformity in the value of the circulating medium is an object greatly to be desired—a currency to be perfect, should be absolutely invariable in value."[2] Proposals
