168 MODERN MONETARY SYSTEMS 
recognise the part played by the State in determining the 
value of the precious metals, the ideas which we have 
assigned to the legislators of the Year XI—that money is 
essentially a commodity and that public authorities cannot 
affect its rate—are still classical. Moreover, they have 
certain apparent advantages on their side. Thus, for 
instance, gold, which since 1873 has alone enjoyed the 
advantage of being almost universally admitted to free 
coinage, can move between one country and another, 
whatever stamp it may bear, without losing any of its 
value apart from the expenses of transport, insurance, 
etc. The stamp affixed by the State does not appear to 
play any considerable part in determining its value, as it 
preserves this stamp in foreign countries to which it is 
only admitted as bullion; hence it appears to be the 
“commercial” value of the bullion which is at the basis 
of the legal value of a coin. 
Moreover, it will be remembered that in instituting a 
system of free coinage under which the mints never 
compelled the metal to be handed over but were always 
ready to receive it in unlimited quantities and give it back 
in full in the form of coins, legislators had believed them- 
selves to be reducing to a minimum and practically 
eliminating their own intervention. It would indeed be a 
paradox if on the one occasion on which the public 
authorities had ceased to attempt regulating the rate of 
precious metals they had actually succeeded in doing so. 
Nevertheless, however plausible the theory may be that 
the value of a currency cannot be determined except like 
that of any ordinary commodity and independently of 
any State intervention, it must be admitted that this 
doctrine rests chiefly on the experience of a system which 
differs widely from that which is now in force and that 
the lessons of this experience may have been superficially 
learnt. Before the Revolution, the State, having bought 
on the rate of precious metals, for instance the stabilisation of the ratio 
between the value of two metals which continued for three-quarters of a 
century by French law, etc.” See also Cauwes, “Cours d’Economie 
Politique,” Vol. I, in particular, p. 50I, § 546 of the second edition, and 
Bourguin, “La mesure de la valeur et la monnaie, p. 192 et seq.