It will thus be seen that the fluctuations in the value or purchasing power of both gold and silver have always been admitted by scientific writers. They were so well understood three centuries ago that in Queen Elizabeth's reign (1576) the British Parliament directed that the rents reserved in the long leases of certain college lands should be payable, not in money, but in wheat. And at various times during the past seventy years propositions have been formulated to substitute for gold and silver as a standard of value for deferred payments, a tabular statement of the prices of the principal articles of commerce, to be made by official authority and published from time to time, by the average of which the fluctuations of gold could be ascertained and proper allowance made for them in the settlement of time transactions. Professor Jevons, Prof. Francis A. Walker, and other political economists of note have expressed approval of such a tabular standard for long-time contracts, as securing greater equity than would gold as a measure of values. Those who now assert that silver has fallen and that gold has not risen in value arrive at this conclusion by a very safe process of reasoning. First, to show that silver has fallen they measure it by gold alone, without reference to the general range of prices; and then to prove that gold has not risen they make it the measure of itself. An increase or decrease of the value of either can not be ascertained by reference to the other, and certainly not by constituting either of them a standard by which to judge itself. It would of course be forever impossible to show any change in the value of gold or silver, or of anything else, measuring it by itself. It is only by looking at the relations which both metals bear respectively to a considerable range of commodities generally dealt in as well as to each other, that it can be ascertained with certainty what has happened. Not only upon consideration of all the facts I have given, but upon the logic of the situation, it must be obvious that gold has risen and will continue to rise in value as long as its volume decreases and the demand for it increases. Since 1860, when 77 per cent. of the combined yield of the two metals, it has diminished not only in relative proportion to the yield of silver, but it has diminished absolutely. For the five years ending with 1860 the yield of gold throughout the world was $137,000,000 a year; for the five years ending 1889 the yield was but $110,000,000 a year. If, as claimed by the advocates of the single gold standard, an increase in the yield of silver decreases the value of silver, by what system of logic can they deny that a decrease in the supply of gold increases the value of gold?