Further Considerations [23]
way of raising, being chang'd, into the value of Gold: For when Silver will buy sixteen times as much Wine, Oyl, and Bread, &c. to day as it would yesterday (all other things remaining the same but the Denomination) it hath the real worth of Gold. This I guess every body sees cannot be so. And yet this must be so, if it be true, that raising the Denomination One fifth can supply the want, or one jot raise the value of Silver in respect of other Commodities; i.e. make a less quantity of it to day, buy a greater quantity of Corn, Oyl and Cloth, and all other Commodities, than it would yesterday, and thereby remove the necessity of Bartering. For if raising the Denomination can thus raise the value of Coin in exchange for other Commodities One fifth, by the same reason it can raise it Two fifths, and afterwards Three fifths, and again, if need be, Four fifths, and as much further as you please. So that by this admirable contrivance of raising our Coin, we shall be as Rich and as well able to support the charge of the Government, and carry on our Trade without bartering or any other inconvenience for want of Money, with sixty thousand Ounces of Coin'd Silver in England, as if we had six or sixty Millions. If this be not so, I desire any one to shew me, why the same way of raising the denomination which can raise the value of Money in respect of other Commodities, One fifth, cannot when you please raise it another fifth, and so on? I beg to be told where it must stop, and why at such a degree without being able to go farther. It must be taken notice of, that the raising I speak of here, is the raising of the value of our Coin in respect of other Commodities (as I call it all along) in contradistinction to raising the Denomination. The confounding of these in Discourses concerning Money, is one great cause, I suspect, that this matter is so little understood, and so often talked of with so little Information of the hearers. A Penny is a denomination no more belonging to eight than to eighty, or to one single grain of Silver: And so it is not necessary that there should be sixty such Pence, no more nor less, in an Ounce of Silver, i.e. twelve in a piece called a Shilling, and sixty in a piece called a Crown; such like divisions being only extrinsical denominations, are every where perfectly arbritrary. For here in England there might as well have been twelve Shillings in a Penny, as twelve Pence in a Shilling, i.e. the denomination of the less piece might have been a Shilling, and of the bigger a Penny. Again, the Shilling might have been Coin'd ten times as big as the Penny, and the Crown ten times as big as the Shilling; whereby the Shilling would have had but ten Pence in it, and the Crown an hundred. But this, however order'd, alters not one jot the value of the Ounce of Silver in respect of other things, any more than it does its weight. This raising being but giving of names at pleasure to aliquot parts of any piece, viz. that now the sixtieth part of an Ounce of Silver shall be called a Penny, and to morrow that the seventy fifth part of an Ounce of Silver shall be called a Penny, may be done with what increase you please: And thus it may be ordered by a Proclamation, that a Shilling shall go for twenty-four Pence, an Half Crown for sixty instead of thirty Pence, and so of the rest. But that an Half-Crown shall be worth, or contain, sixty such Pence as the Pence were before this change of denomination was made, that no Power on earth can do: Nor can any Power (but that which can make the plenty or scarcity of Commodities) raise the value of our Money thus double in respect of other Commodities, and make that the same piece, or quantity of Silver, under a double denomination, shall purchase double the quantity of Pepper, Wine or Lead, an instant after such Proclamation, to what it would do an instant before. If this could be, we might, as every one sees, raise Silver to the value of Gold, and make our selves as Rich as we pleased. But 'tis but going to Market with an Ounce of Silver of One hundred and twenty pence,