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 V. VALUE IS A NUMERICAL RELATION. Legal use of the words unit of value—Their importance—They are not defined in the law—Unit a synonym for measure—Evolution of the word value—Its Classical meaning related to the power of numbers —During the Dark Ages it became associated with labour—In the Rennaissance it acquired the meaning of an attribute of matter— Fallacy of this last view—The correct nature of value rediscovered by Montesquieu and Bastiat—Value shown to be a numerical ratio between all exchangeable things—Its further character difficult to define because of its continual variance—Though indefinable it is not immeasurable— Value measurable by the whole numbers of money—The existing mint laws practically make the whole numbers of money or unit or measure of value to consist of an indefinite sum whose only limits fluctuate between illimitable demand and uncertain supply. r I "HE laws of the United States ordain that either one -- of several different coins weighing so many grains, or of pieces of paper of such a size, each called a dollar, shall be " the unit of value." It is not extravagant to say that upon these two little words hang much of the welfare of the country. When either of them is changed there will have happened a momentous revolution. Important as they are, neither of these words is defined in the law. Reasoning from its use in analogous cases, " unit" is a synonym for measure; but the meaning ofvalue is not to be determined by analogy, for there is no analogous use of it in the statutes. When it is remembered that the ablest logicians of all countries, from Aristotle to Mill, have vainly endeavoured to give it form, it will begin to be seen how complex and obscure the nature of value must be, and therefore in what great uncertainty the ...