TO DISCOVER A STABLE STANDARD 197 
in some monetary instrument or merely in the form of a 
unit of account in regulating payments by setting off one 
claim against another. Again it is the author who empha- 
sises this fact. This being the case, how can it be admitted 
that prices, which express the exchange ratio between 
dollars (for instance) and goods, will be determined as if 
the said goods were exchanged, not for the dollars, but 
for a variable quantity of gold unknown to the man in the 
street and independent of the number of the said dollars ? 
Indeed there is one assumption on which variations 
in the weight of fine metal represented in the dollar might 
under such a system react on dollar prices. This assump- 
tion is that the system would not be universally adopted 
and other countries would remain with a system of free 
coinage for gold and a constant correspondence between 
the monetary unit and a given weight of fine metal. For 
in this case any change in the fine metal content of the 
dollar would produce a change in the par rate between the 
dollar and other gold currencies; the gold points would 
be shifted and the rate of exchange would consequently 
be modified when it depended on the gold points.! 
Hence in the event of a rise in prices which would 
bring about an increase of the content of gold in the dollar, 
the latter, instead of representing as it does at the present 
time approximately one-fifth of a gold pound, would 
represent a larger fraction. Thus it would become possible 
by having dollars re-coined into pounds to obtain a larger 
number of units in the latter currency and therefore the 
price of imported goods payable in sterling would fall and 
tend more or less to bring about a fall in the general 
internal price level in America. 
But this is a possibility which Mr. Irving Fisher does 
not appear to have contemplated ; and it is contrary to his 
views and to his wishes; for in order to meet a rise in 
world price it would be necessary to take international 
measures. But if Mr. Fisher's system were applied all 
over the world and if therefore gold were admitted to free 
1 This was clearly pointed out during the above-mentioned discussions, 
particularly by M. Edmond Théry.