Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV BIMETALLISM 24. In our last chapter we treated thesubjectof the Foreign Exchanges, and perceived that what is exchanged between two countries in commerce is goods, that in the long run payment for goods is made in goods, the means of payment being, to a large extent, bills of exchange. We further saw that though money, in the form of coin, is used to some extent, it is not used to anything like the extent that might have been supposed, but on the contrary is employed mainly to settle up the (comparatively) small balances which international commerce leaves in the case of one or other of the two countries trading. But though the employment of actual coin is thus relatively small compared with the great mass of international trade, it is yet large enough to cause considerable trouble when, as frequently happens, and has happened lately in an especial manner, the money used by different nations is of different kinds and of varying values. The difficulties which bimetallism seeks to remedy are caused by the fact that some countries use gold as their standard metal for coinage and others use silver, and that the relative value of silver and gold has of late years fluctuated very considerably. It has been stated that out of the total of 1400 million peoplewho inhabit this earth only 400 million employ gold for their standard coin, and most of the remaining population (if they employ anything at all, which they often do not) employ for their standard coins silver. 25. Bimetallism. But now we come to the questions: What is meant by bimetallism ? and, What do bimetallists hope to accomplish ? Bimetallism really means two-metal- lism instead of monometallism or one-metallism. That is to say, instead of making only one metal, as gold in England, the sole metal which is...