value to bring about desired results. A concurrent circulation must mean one which is concurrent, and if it is to offer debtors the whole mass of both metals to pay their debts with, it must be permanent. If both metals should be used for a time until prices and contracts were adjusted to them, and then one should rise so much as to go out of use, the consequences would be disastrous to debtors beyond anything now apprehended.
I proceed then to criticize the notions of a concurrent circulation, as to their common features. The error with them all is that they try to corner commodities the supply of which is beyond their control or knowledge. That is a fatal error in any corner, as I have already shown. If it were proposed that each nation should have a certain amount of circulation, composed of the two metals in equal parts, and then that the circulation should be closed, then the corner might work and there would be some sense in it. Suppose that a nation had two hundred millions of fixed circulation, half gold and half silver, and that this sum was not in excess of its requirement for money. Then I do not see how either half of the coinage should fall relatively to the other; but if silver did fall, every dollar of silver which was sought would involve the relinquishment of a dollar in gold and this exchange would act on equal and limited amounts of each metal. It would then depress one metal and raise the other to an exactly equal degree. The balance might, in that case, be retained. The hypothesis of a closed circulation is, however, preposterous. No one thinks of it.
The plan of a concurrent circulation with a free mint strikes, upon close examination, at every step, against difficulties of that sort which warn a scientific man that he is dealing with an empirical and impossible delusion. How is it to be brought about? The movement towards a bimetallic circulation would never begin unless the ratio of the
