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Writing: A Remedy for the Country

A Remedy for the Country, § 8

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§ 8

It is unnecessary, however, to dwell long on the damage caused to our finances in a past era. Our own age has particularly distinguished itself in this regard. Let us look at the situation in our time.

One still hears some people praise the Bank loans and lobby for the reopening of the Bank,1 but even more who wish to lay all the blame on them and believe that our monetary regulations are unparalleled and would absolve them from playing any part in our tragedy. But if the reader simply wishes to pursue the truth, I hope he will not fail to observe how over-hasty such opinions are on both sides. Unless the matter is understood in its context, it will be impossible to cure the malady correctly.

The evil described above, namely that the denominations daler and mark have

not denoted a definite quantity of any metal, has continued in our time, so that the daler has within a few years undergone erratic changes of from 100 to 200 per cent, during which time the same denomination has nevertheless been used in all commercial transactions as a measure of the value of commodities.

One and the same amount of silver, for example 2 lod of silver of a purity of 14/16 or 1 riksdaler specie corresponded in 1735 to 36 coined mark but in 1762 to 108 mark, and has passed through every degree in between both before and since then. As certain and incontrovertible as it is that 2 lod of fine silver is and remains the same, so, too, does 1/36, or the mark of 1735, also relate to 1/108, that is the mark of 1762, as 3 does to 1, and as there are 8 öre to each mark and 32 to each daler, it is also obvious that the value of the öre as against any metal has undergone the same change.

Throughout all this, as also long before, the silver mark and daler coins have, under the monetary regulations, retained their ratio to the copper mark and daler coins unchanged at 3 to 1 and have thus been debased in exactly the same way.

Now in order to grasp the chaotic nature of all of this directly and in a few words, let us just imagine that it were to become permissible in a retail shop to use a different ell every week, which within a few years might become two-thirds shorter than the one used previously, and to use these in part to lend, in part to sell thousands of ells of all kinds of fabrics without comparing them to any standard measure, and add to that a ruling that one may not call in the loans by the same ell-measure with which they were measured out or pay for the ell that was two-thirds shorter with less money than for the longer one, simply because both are called ells, then I ask: What commerce? What security, dear reader, do you think such a procedure would achieve? Or how easily might it not happen that many a simple person, unaware that the ell was being whittled down a little every week, could quite innocently trade away all his property, which would fall prey to the cunning rogue.

But it would seem even more peculiar to me if, in order to correct such a thing and to establish a standard ell-measure, one were to assert that it was indispensable to add a small piece at a time to the shortened ell over several years.


  1. One still hears some people praise the Bank loans. . .: regarding the practices of the Bank of the Estates, see Anders Chydenius’s life and work/The Diet of 1765–6

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