and corporate responsibility would somehow survive in party after the extirpation of the organic structure with which they are associated, finds no parallel except in the case of the Cheshire cat, whose grin remained after the cat had disappeared. This portion of Professor Goodnow's treatise exhibits an irrelevancy to the premises obtained by his analysis of political conditions, which indicates some error in fundamental conceptions. Perhaps this error is the tacit assumption that the forms of the state found in state and local government possess the ethical nature of the highest known form of the state-the vertebrate type to which our national government belongs, but that this ethical nature is somehow suppressed by party organization. That is a mistake. There is no such ethical nature in those low forms of the state; whatever rudimentary ethical traits are found in them were communicated by extraneous influence and are not a natural characteristic. Inquiry into the political history of our cities will show that before party rule became firmly established they were subject to gang rule, and impartial observation at the present time will show that by so much as restrictive legislation is effective in removing municipal government from regular party control it tends to pass under gang rule again. Lower than this our politics can hardly get, for the principle of personal leadership defies all schemes of pulverizing society into atoms, and the ideal of a community without differentiation of political function in the mass of its citizenship can never be realized. Nominations to office will always be made by the few no matter how many may seem to participate, and the only open questions are the extent and the location of the responsibility.

The true method of improvement is that which Professor Goodnow points out-administrative centralization, and in proportion as the general body of citizens are relieved of the duty of selecting officials for administrative position public control over the conduct of administration will increase. This relief party is extending by converting elective offices

into mere party appointments and by so much as party management increases its power of dictation in such matters, by so much it augments its responsibility and perfects its organization as an instrument of control for public use. A marked instance of this tendency was presented during the last political campaign in Pennsylvania. Some exposures were made concerning one of the candidates for state office, endangering the success of the ticket as a whole, so that he was forced to resign, and the party leaders appointed in his place a candidate whose high merits were universally admitted. If the candidates had been grouped by offices on the official ballot instead of being offered as a party ticket the party management would have been to a large extent relieved of the responsibility, pressure upon which enabled public opinion to purge the ticket. If political arrangements were such that the candidates were nominated by the direct action of the voters themselves there would be no responsibility left whatever. If the people should really make the nominations themselves whom are they to hold responsible for injudicious choice?

It hardly requires argument to prove that the presidential election is a consultation of the mass of the people as to the general policy of the government and the objects of the administration. The people are called upon to control the government, not to administer it; and they can do the one because they do not have to do the other. But in state

and municipal government the people are called upon to administer the government, and their control is proportionately defective. Popular control over the national gov .nment was impossible until party had reduced the electoral colleges to merely ministerial functions and brought the political activities of the various states into subordination to centralized party authority. Popular control over state and municipal government will be impossible until in one way or another similar integration of authority is accomplished. When state and municipal elections become simply a con

sultation of the people upon administrative policy, as in the presidential election, then the people will acquire a real control over the government there too. The great hindrance to constitutional growth in this direction is the habit of reform in the structure of government, unsettling the type and arresting functional development.

HENRY JONES Ford.

Pittsburg, Pa.

THE LAW OF THE VALUE OF MONEY.

The value of money is fixed by the same laws as those which govern the value of other commodities, -the laws of supply and demand, as influenced by cost of production. The application of these laws and their interpretation is more difficult, however, in the case of metallic money than in that of other commodities, because the terms which express value are themselves terms of money. As money is the usual measure of value, and the standard with which other values are compared, it is difficult to find simple forms of expression for measuring the measure, for comparing the standard. The difficulty is made greater by the fact that the intellectual conception of value is that of a ratio rather than a tangible property. It is not possible to point to an object and say that it contains value in a definite amount, as it may be said that it possesses length or breadth or weight. The value relates to the comparison with some other object, which may be constantly changing, and is not a comparison of visible qualities, but of the intellectual conception of the utility of the object.1

The utility of diverse objects is measured by a common denominator whose units are expressed in money. When the attempt is made, therefore, to determine the value of money, the determination can only be made by comparison with some other object or series of objects, or by some general intellectual conception. Changes in demand and therefore in the utility of most commodities manifest themselves by means of prices. A diminishing demand leaves excessive visible supplies upon the market, lowers prices, and suggests the wisdom of reducing production. The case is

1" Naturally, as valuation itself is a less definite conception than the length or weight of a thing, money can measure less absolutely the value of the thing than the meter does for length or the kilogram for weight."-Beaure, Théorie et Pratique de la Monnaie, p. 17.

different with metallic money, since the fall in its price is expressed only in the enhanced prices of other commodities, and by reason of its high exchangeability, there never appears to be a supply upon the market which cannot be disposed of for its full value. As the condition is expressed by M. Babelon: 1

"For iron, lead, copper and coal there are variable quotations in the market upon which they are offered. If they are too abundant, if their outlet is closed, if competition develops, their price falls, the manager of the mine sees his profits diminish and the marketing of his products become more difficult. If he finds he is making a loss, he is forced to abandon the mine or to await at his own risk the return of better days. Quite otherwise is the situation of the producer of the monetary metal. As he has the capacity of converting into cash of legal tender power (à cours forcé) all the metal which he draws from his mine, he has always an assured outlet for his products; there is neither rise nor fall for his pieces of twenty francs, whatever the number which he may have struck."

The value of money is determined in precisely the same manner as the value of wheat, or iron, or houses. It is only the forms of expressing this value, and the differences in the character of the demand, which offer difficulties. The immediate influence which operates upon the value of money and upon the value of other things is the relation between the supply and the demand. In the case of money, changes in the demand have much more influence than changes in the supply. The supply of the precious metals over any two short intervals of time is a nearly fixed quantity, increasing in only small proportions from year to year, while the demand varies within the widest limits. The demand for money is much like the demand for wheat in the produce exchange markets. It is not a demand for consumption, but for the fulfillment of certain contracts. When business is normal and solvent, these contracts largely balance each other. An individual having contracted to pay certain sums of money, finds them offset by sums which 1 Les Origines de la Monnaie, p. 285.