And if we circulate gold only through paper representatives redeemable only in gold bullion and discontinue gold coins, these periodical changes in the weight of the gold dollar can be made even more easily than the occasional changes which history records.
In actual fact gold now circulates almost entirely through paper "yellowbacks," or gold certificates. The gold itself (often not in the form of coins at all but of "bar gold") lies in the Government vaults.
A bar of gold bullion, nine tenths fine, weighing 25,800 grains, is just as properly to be called one thousand dollars of 25.8 grains each, as if that bar were cut up into a hundred separate pieces and each were stamped into a ten-dollar gold piece. The thousand gold dollars already exist embedded or welded together in that gold bar, while the right of ownership in them circulates in the form of paper "yellowbacks."
Since, then, even to-day, most of our gold dollars do their circulating in the form of paper, there would be no inconvenience if the only circulation of gold were in the form of paper. Most of the people in England who, before the war, carried gold in their pockets by preference, have already been weaned from the habit ; and most of the few Americans (in California, Oregon, and Washington) who still do so are being weaned from it in the same way.
It would, therefore, be little more than expressing in law an existing custom if gold coins were abolished altogether. For simplicity, let us assume that this is to be done.[1] When, therefore, I speak of changing, from time to time, the weight of the gold dollar, the reader need not conjure up visions of repeated recoinages, or gold
- ↑ As noted in Appendix VI, §3, B, this was proposed by Ricardo.
