!!! This text was extracted from an image and needs proofreading !!!
(May 1889)
Publications:
- The Path, vol. IV, no. 2, May 1889, pp. 47-49
Read:
DATA
Title for references: Connelly JH - A Dream of Gold
Short description: A speculation on the social and economic consequences, drawing on Edward Bellamy's Looking Backwar...
47 It is affirmed by the author of a pamphlet recently issued by the T. P. S., that a number of alchemists—long ago—made gold. It has also been claimed that the ability to do so is possessed by the Adepts at the present day. But, it is said, that knowledge has been withheld from the many because it would be so dangerous a power in its effect upon the well-being of humanity. Would it? Let us speculate on that a little.
Of course it is only in its character as a medium of exchange that the value of gold is a matter of any serious importance. And even there its importance is limited and conditional, not absolute. So far as the domestic necessities of a tribe, or of a nation, are concerned, anything that represents a fixed value—based, as all measures of value must be, upon human labor—would be quite as good as gold for purposes of exchange. Wampum, cowrie shells, leather, glass beads, and brass wire, all mediums of local exchange within certain territorial limitations, answer the wants of those who choose to view them severally as money, quite as well as gold coin serves in higher and more artificial civilization. And, in the most highly civilized countries, paper has very largely supplanted gold. A million dollars, in checks and bank notes, change hands, for every hundred dollars in gold coin passed in business in New York, London, and Paris to-day. The yellow metal is simply a form of easily handled and readily convertible property, only valuable as the representative of intrinsic values in land, grain, or some other inherently useful thing, which metal representative in its turn serves as the intermediary basis of value for the more convenient representative paper.
Why may not this intermediary be eliminated, leaving the paper representative to stand directly upon its real basis of primary intrinsic values?
48 The principal reason is the consequent destruction of the accumulated human labor concentrated in that form of representative property. That loss would be heavy, no doubt, but by no means so enormous that consideration of it should be allowed to stand in the way of human progress. And it would be so diffused that its burden could easily be borne. At the first intimation of the possibility of such destruction, there would doubtless be alarmed haste on the part of holders for conversion of their gold into more stable values; a process in which they would be eagerly aided by the incredulous ones; and so the volume of gold in circulation would be widely scattered. The heaviest loss would naturally be sustained by the national treasury, and then we would hear no more about "reduction of the surplus"—which would be some compensation, at least.
For a time there would naturally be much unsettling of all values, alike of labor and its products, but the determination of their relations would necessarily be in the direction of a more equable adjustment than now obtains. Bringing values nearer to their real and only source, labor, would dignify it. At the same time, the tendency to accumulation would be discouraged by the absence of the permanent and easily convertible concentration of wealth now afforded by gold. Next to gold, land would of course be, for a time, the means of concentration of accumulations, but under the changed social conditions then existent that tendency would readily be controlled by law. Business would take on entirely new conditions. We could not return to semi-barbaric methods. It would be very nice and simple if A, having made a pair of shoes more than he required, could trade them directly for their value in the flour he wanted, with B, who had an excess of flour but wanted shoes. But such direct exchanges by individual producers, to any appreciable extent, would be manifestly impossible, even in a small community, and how much more would they be so if attempted throughout the country? To carry on the complex business system inseparable from our present social organization, we would have to possess some medium of exchange bearing accepted standard value. But what could it be? The government could not supply a currency. Coin, of any kind, would be out of the question, for if the processes of nature could be successfully imitated in the production of real gold, no other available metal would be any more secure against the alchemists' art. And paper money would be no resource. No paper money can have any value in itself. It has only a representative value. It must necessarily be simply a promise to pay, on demand, a specific sum of some real and tangible value. And a promise to pay, to be worth anything, must be based upon the possession, by the maker of the promise, of the wherewithal to pay with. Now if coin, the intermediary representative of real values, is wiped out, the government has nothing, and can have 49nothing, with which to make good such promises, except perhaps land-scrip, which would soon be inadequate in volume, and unstable in value, actually representing—at best—nothing but a theoretical and disputable right to permanently divert the public domain to individual ownership.
It is not easy to see any escape from the dilemma in which we would be placed by destruction of the value of gold, other than in the direction of an entire re-construction of our social system. Mr. Bellamy, in his excellent work "Looking Backward," portrays an admirable and certainly possible communal condition of society, in which all its members have equal rights and interests in and under a government that is truly of, by, and for the people; wherein labor is not shorn of its reward; avarice is impossible of indulgence; poverty and care have been eliminated from the problem of life; and evil has died a natural death. Without venturing to hope that this glorious dream of a millenium may find realization in full for many a century to come, we may at least deem it not at all impossible that a great approximation toward it would be the necessary consequence of the destruction of gold as a medium of exchange of values.
Happily the commercial and financial interests of the civilized world are now so interwoven that the sweeping effects of bringing gold down, say to a lead basis of value, would be simultaneously felt by all nations, and whatever impetus might thus be given to an upward movement of humanity in reformation of its social systems would be shared by all. And only one thing stands in the way of its realization—viz.—making the gold.
Perhaps this obstacle may be removed, or perchance an immense deposit of gold may be discovered, and thus at once all the fortunes now founded on the precious metal will be swept away. At one or the other of these events Mme. Blavatsky has pointed in recent papers. These are times of changes, and nothing should surprise us,—not even such a stupendous thing as the discovery of how to manufacture gold.
J. H. Connelly.