quantity of goods coming to market; and the Quantity. Theory of money shows us that steadiness of prices is secured, or assisted, by steadiness in the relation between the volume of money and that of goods. Practical business men, who often want more credit than is good for them, used also to rail at the restriction upon the credit facilities of the country involved by the gold standard. They argued that industry can only expand if any adventurous person who thinks that he can make a profit by starting and organizing "enterprises of great pith and moment" can always be certain by applying to his bank to get as much credit as he wants, and that the limitation on the power of banks to create credit, imposed by the gold standard, made industry most absurdly depend on the amount of gold that was being dug up out of the bowels of the earth and shipped to this country.
Certainly it is easy to make merry over a system based on a metal which was chosen by mankind as a medium of exchange, because of its universal appeal to male and female vanity, and is even now, owing to the hoarding habits of primitive peoples into whose control it comes, often dug up in one quarter of the globe only to be buried in another. But imperfect
