And first of all, it is desirable because it is scarce. Abundance begets cheapness, and rarity the reverse. That is most valuable which involves the greatest amount of effort to acquire. But we must not jump from this to the conclusion that were gold to become as plentiful as iron, and be as easily obtained, it would recede in value to the equivalent of iron, bulk for bulk. Gold has an intrinsic value superior to that of all other metals because it has _useful_ properties possessed by none other. It is more durable than any, and is practically indestructible, as Egyptian excavations and Schliemann’s discoveries in Greece have shown. It may be melted and remelted without losing in weight. It resists the action of acids, but is readily fusible. It is so malleable that a grain of it may be beaten out to cover fifty-six square inches with leaves—used in gilding and in other ways innumerable—only the twenty-eight thousand two-hundredth of an inch in thickness. It is so ductile that a grain of it may be drawn out in wire five hundred feet in length. The splendour of its appearance excels that of all other metals. Its supereminent claims were symbolised by the Jews in the golden breastplates of the priests, as they are by the Christian in his highest hopes of a Golden City hereafter. We signalise the sacredness of the marriage-tie with the gold-ring. Professors of what Carlyle called the ‘dismal science’ have not unfrequently expressed a contempt for gold; but in doing so, they have regarded it merely as the correlative of money. As money, according to them, is merely a counter with little or no intrinsic value, therefore gold has no intrinsic value beyond its adaptability in the arts. John Stuart Mill held that were the supply of gold suddenly doubled, no one would be the richer, for the only effect would be to double the price of everything. Stanley Jevons went so far as to say that the gold produced in Australia and California represented ‘a great and almost dead loss of labour.’ He held that ‘gold is one of the last things which can be considered wealth in itself,’ and that ‘it is only so far as the cheapening of gold renders it more available for gilding and for plate, for purposes of ornament and use other than money, that we can be said to gain directly from gold discoveries.’ Another writer, Bonamy Price, asserts that it is a ‘wonderful apostasy,’ a ‘fallacy full of emptiness and absurdity,’ to suppose that gold is precious except as a tool. We might multiply quotations all tending to show that while a certain class of philosophers admit a limited value in gold as a metal, they claim that it loses the value immediately it is transformed into a coin.