Excerpt from Gold and Silver Weighed in the Balance If the debased refuse of twenty different dynasties could be weighed in the balance by the rupee current, could not our even more unfortunate rupees be similarly dealt with? Here is a suggestion: a rupee current in those days represented a certain (i assume ascertainable) average wage of a certain number of days' agricultural labour in Bengal. What if Adam Smith's grand idea of labour as the measure of value had been seized upon, and the rupee current, our ideal coin, been made by law and custom the symbol of t/zat quantity of labour? Had that been done, the rupee current could never have de preciated any more than it could have been clipped or otherwise falsified. Only silver rupees could be thus influenced by their increasing in number more rapidly than the people among whom they are distributed. The Bengal Land Revenue might then have been fixed as so many rupees current, and as the silver rupees increas ed in number and fell in value, more and more of them would, have been - perhaps uncomplainingly - paid by the tax-payer for the more they have depreciated, the more easy of attainment they have become. The rupee current, always the symbol of so many days' work, would at all times have indicated with u'nerring justice the exact number of depreciated silver rupees due just as it did indicate the number of clipped coins necessary to compose a given sum. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.