The Sun.
London, England, 1856-01-21 00:00:00

CiIILD ?

(From, the Derbyshire Courier.)
Lord John Russell has recently been usefully and
honourably employed in attending a ragged school
meeting at Gloucester. His lordship has long been the
strenuous and indefatigable advocate of the education Of
the children of the poor, and the speech which he ad-
dressed to his audience at this meeting is well deserving
of attentive perusal and of honourable mention by all
who recognise the paramount importance of this great
national question.

The Times writes an article on the occasion, and in
imitation of the question once asked by Sir Robert Peel
What is a Pound ? proposes another question--What is
a Child ?

The writer's object appears to be very much that of
Peel when he asked his question, viz., to excite atten-
tion. A child can ask a question which ten wise men
may be puzzled to answer. So the writer, like a prudent
man, does not attempt to answer his awn question, but
facetiously suggests the various ways in which various
philosophical investigators would define a child. Till the
Times, therefore, tells us what a child really is, we intend
to rest content with the very simple, and at the same
time comprehensive, definition of the learned Mr.
Cranium, whose acquaintance we had the pleasureef
making some years ago at Headling Hall. A child, our
philosophical friend assures us, is a " Osteosarcbmsnatos-
plceuehnochondroneurornuelous compages, or shell, which
at once envelopes and developer that mysterious and in•
estimable kernel—the desiderative, determinative, ratio-
cinative, imaginative, inquisitive, appetitive, compara- '
bye, reminiscent, congeries of ideas and notions, simple
and compound, comprised in the comprehensive deno-
mination of the mind."

The answer which that great philosopher, Sir Robert
Peel, gave to his own question was to toss a sovereign
into the air, and announce to his expectant auditors
"This is a pound." The Times writer, following this
excellent example, tosses up his "little human fourpenny
bit," and then proceeds, like a practical lean, to give
good advice as to the way of making the best of it. It
would have been a happy thing for the country if Sir
Robert had done the same.

The captain of a man-of-war can always tell you
exactly what o'clock it is—for he can "make it" what
tune he pleases. Peel could tell us any time within the
last 30 years exactly what a pound is—for his bill of
1819 made it what he chose, viz., 123 grains of gold.
But what was a pound in former days I Servius Tullius
first coined money at Rome, and then the Roman As, or
pound, contained a Roman pound of good copper. The
English pound in the time of Edward I. contained a
pound of silver of a known fineness. In 1352, our gold
pound, representing 20 shillings, contained 360 grains of
fine gold, worth 3/. 49. in our present money. In 1466
it contained only 240 grains. In 1552 it contained 174
grains. In 1650, 140 grains. In 1750, 129 grains, of
gold passed for 1/. is. Do the Bullionists imagine that
Peel's Bill has defined a pound, as 123 grains of gold, to
the world's end ?
The Times rightly concludes that the management
and
training of a child is more important than his philoso- '
phical definition. We think it more important that a •
statesman should make a people prosperous and happy
than that he should speculate upon standards of value.
We have paid a tolerably high price for that piece of ;
flippant ignorance of Sir R. Peel, when he told us that a
sovereign could mean nothing but 123 grains of gold.
The pressure of our national debt has been doubled. It
might have been paid off by this time ; it remains be- ?•
tween 700 and 800 millions. What has been the ruin
to thousands of merchants and traders and their families ;
bow many estates have passed away from their heredi-
tary possessors into the hands of usurers; how many
hundreds of thousands, yes millions, of honest, indus-
trious, toil-worn Englishmen of the working classes have
passed from comfort into privation, from privation into
distress, from distress into misery, crime, or the grave, in direct consequence of the operation of Peel's mone-
tary system.

Let us, however, take the pound as we find it-123
grains of gold. What is now best to be done ? We
answer at once that the best thing to be done is to allow
the gold pound to find its market price in national paper
money. The pound has fluctuated from 360 grains in
1352 to 123 grains in 1856. Let it fluctuate from year
to year instead of from century to century. One of the
commonest mistakes which persons make about the
currency is to fancy that by fixing the paper pound at
123 grains of gold they somehow or other secure some
advantage. Is it so ? Of what possible advantage can
it be that five times 123 grains of gold may always (ex-
cept when it is wanted in tinie of panic or depression) be
obtained for a Si. note ? The Times has answered that
question. " The worst of it is," said the Times not long
since, " that you can only get half as much of anything
for a sovereign (not a paper representative of a sovereign
observe) now as you did a short time since."
It is not the 123 grains of gold that is important to
one ; it is the purchasing power that is the important
thing. _

Peel had no doubt some vague idea that by fixing the
quantity of gold which a paper pound should always re.
present, he gave greater fixity to the purchasing power of
the pound. Such has not been the case. There have been
greater fluctuations in the value of money, looking either
at its purchasing power, or at the interest paid for its
use, since the passing of Peel's bill of 1819, than ever
occurred before in a similar period of time. It is evi-
dent that if you wish to ha►e a real standard of value
to which the relative value of all other things may be
referred, the purchasing power of that which you make
the standard must be invariable. There is, there elan
be, no such thing in the world.
Yet in search of this philosopher's stone, England has
bee❑ half ruined.
We know also an approximation to a standard of
value. If we take wheat, barley, and oats the
three principal descriptions of grain—and add other
articles of general consumption, such as beef, mutton,
and pork, the average price of these articles, for a series
of years, would form for an endowment the best standard
of value at which we could arrive-rand that, after all,
is but an approximation.
But with regard to the question itself, " What is a
Pound ?" we ask with Bishop Berkeley, " whether the
true idea of money is not altogether that of a ticket or
counter ?" And believing it to be so we reply that a
Pound, as it ought to be in England in 1856, is 123
grains of gold, and as much more or less as the fluctua •
tion of the market may make it.