The adoption of the gold standard by Austria is now in progress, and
there is every assurance that it will be carried into effect. That
country had had the single silver standard since 1857, but was under
a suspension of specie payments. When it was ascertained in 1879
that the decline in silver was likely to be permanent the Government
gave orders to the mints in both Austria and Hungary to receive no
more of that metal from private individuals for coinage. The effect
of this order was to make Government paper money the standard, and
this paper varied from day to day in comparison with gold, as did our
greenbacks before we resumed specie payments. Some silver was coined on
Government account, but as a matter of fact that metal was discarded as
a standard by the refusal to coin for private persons. Austria had a
gold coinage, indeed, but the gold was commercial money only. It had no
legal-tender faculty, but passed at its quoted value from day to day.
Since 1879 the problem of finance in Austria has been two-fold, namely,
to resume specie payments (which must, under the circumstances, be
gold payments), and to fix a ratio at which all paper money and paper
obligations should be redeemable. The ratio decided upon was that of
119 paper to 100 gold, that being the average ratio prevailing in the
market during the thirteen years from 1879 to 1892.
As the question of standard was really settled by Austria in 1879, when
she closed her mints to silver, we are concerned to know how she came
to take that step. The report of the special commission of the upper
house on this subject, submitted last year, says that it had become
clear as long ago as the decade 1860–1870, when Europe was becoming
saturated with gold, that this was the only metal fitted to be the
standard of nations of advanced civilization. “Gold was dominant and
the standard of value,” says this report, “in all trade on a great
scale as early as the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, even though
silver was then the standard in all domestic exchanges. * * * _In
every age there is some metal dominant in the industry of the world
which forces its way with elemental strength in the face of any public
regulation, and in our day gold is that metal._”
This is as good a statement as can be made of the reasons why not
only Austria but all the other nations whose action we have examined,
including the United States, have adopted the single gold standard.
While Austria has been collecting her supply of the yellow metal we
have heard a great deal about the “scramble for gold.” Why is there a
scramble for gold? Merely because gold is universally acceptable. All
civilized people are willing to exchange their property for it to any
extent, and this is the only thing they are willing to accept in that
way without limit or reserve. That is a good and sufficient reason why
there is a scramble for gold and why there is no similar scramble for
silver.