As a very
long and a very dull treatise, however, would scarcely suffice to explain
all the reasons for our thinking so, we must devote the one or two pages
that are given us to a few simple, elementary, frontal principles,
familiar, no doubt, to every one, and therefore the more important to be
recalled, when every one seems to have forgotten them. Nothing is better
known than the laws of gravitation; nothing staler in the repetition; but
if the folk around us are building their houses so that they all fall down
upon our heads, it behooves us to remind them of those laws.
1. Human wisdom has discovered nothing clearer than this,--that in all the
operations of trade above a primitive barter, you must have a standard or
measure of values; and human ingenuity has never been able to devise any
standard more perfect, in essential respects, than the precious metals. It
may be doubted, indeed, whether the choice of these metals for currency
is a result of human ingenuity. Paley and his school of theologians
demonstrate the existence, intelligence, and goodness of God from the
evidences of design in creation,--from that nice adaptation of means to
ends which shows an infinite knowledge and infinite benevolence at work;
but no one of the instances in which they found their argument, from
the watch, which affords the primal illustration, to the human body,
which furnishes the most complex confirmations, is a more astonishing or
exquisite proof of pre-arrangement than is the adaptedness of gold and
silver to the purposes of currency.
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