ABSTRACT
Professor Fisher endeavours to solve the problem as to how gold might be made to serve the currency without at the same time undoing it, as he believes it to have done in the past. He seems to reason something like this: Gold cannot be eliminated out of the system by a decree the way some hasty critics imagine and affirm that it can; gold will always be thought of and treated as money. But the price (called value) of gold has always varied, and must vary for ever. How, then, is this unstable gold to be combined with a standard of value that shall be stable? At the bottom of the problem, with Professor Fisher, lies a vague feeling that there must be some sort of natural innate stability connected with gold; otherwise the device of a gold dollar, part stable, part unstable, could not have recommended itself to him. As it is to be kept at a parity with the goods dollar, the gold dollar will have unvarying purchasing power like the former; for it is provided in his scheme that the weight of the gold dollar shall be recomputed when it has appreciably detached itself from the standard. But as the price of gold is expected to vary, the weight of the gold dollar would be variable. There is as good a Sphinx as any that has been set up: variable and invariable in one. We shall come to realize yet how very near Professor Fisher's solution comes to the true one, in spite of its roundabout method.
