TO DISCOVER A STABLE STANDARD 193 
On the other hand, it would be impossible, in the 
absence of any express legal provision, to consider as 
illegal any clause under which a payment at a given date 
was fixed in relation to changes in the average price level 
and therefore in the purchasing power of the currency. 
When applied to a long-term contract between private 
individuals a provision of this kind justly takes into 
account events which cannot be foreseen and it could 
ultimately only promote the conclusion of such contracts. 
But apart from the fact that the stipulation to pay in gold 
units is not completely adequate to the case, since it in 
fact relates such payments to the rate of exchange with 
countries on gold currencies, whereas the real risk which 
it is desired to avoid is the change in the internal purchas- 
ing power of the currency, it has the serious disadvantage 
of encouraging an agio on gold in internal transactions, 
and so runs the risk of accelerating internal depreciation 
by linking it up with the loss on exchange. The habit 
of the commercial world in countries with highly depreci- 
ated currencies, such as Austria, Poland and Germany, 
of keeping their accounts and subsequently of fixing their 
prices according to the rate of the dollar, was indeed a 
result of the depreciation which had already taken place. 
But it also contributed largely to increasing this depreci- 
ation by inducing changes in the price of a large number 
even of non-imported commodities, which immediately 
followed all the exchange movements due to the fancies 
and panics of international speculation. Finally, the habit 
of keeping accounts in a foreign currency must necessarily give 
further encouragement to private individuals to obtain that 
currency in order to preserve their savings; the quite unusual 
demand for media of payment abroad which results [from this 
practice creates an irremediable deficit in the trade balance 
and so drags the exchange and the internal depreciation into a 
vicious circle. 
Hence it seems that apart from coefficients of variations 
reference to Article 143 of the Code de Commerce, at any rate since the 
law of February 12th, 1916, has prohibited discrimination between gold 
currency and the national fiduciary currency. 
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