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Committee of the House of Lords on the Bank Acts, a governor of the Bank of England says, with
regard to the abrasion of gold coins during currency: “Every year a fresh class of sovereigns becomes
too light. The class which one year passes with full weight, loses enough by wear and tear to draw the
scales next year against it.” (House of Lords’ Committee, 1848, n. 429.)
37
The following passage from Fullarton shows the want of clearness on the part of even the best
writers on money, in their comprehension of its various functions: “That, as far as concerns our
domestic exchanges, all the monetary functions which are usually performed by gold and silver coins,
may be performed as effectually by a circulation of inconvertible notes paying no value but that
factitious and conventional value they derive from the law is a fact which admits, I conceive, of no
denial. Value of this description may be made to answer all the purposes of intrinsic value, and
supersede even the necessity for a standard, provided only the quantity of issues be kept under due
limitation.” (Fullerton: “Regulation of Currencies,” London, 1845, p. 21.) Because the commodity that
serves as money is capable of being replaced in circulation by mere symbols of value, therefore its
functions as a measure of value and a standard of prices are declared to be superfluous!
38
From the fact that gold and silver, so far as they are coins, or exclusively serve as the medium of
circulation, become mere tokens of themselves, Nicholas Barbon deduces the right of Governments
“to raise money,” that is, to give to the weight of silver that is called a shilling the name of a greater
weight, such as a crown; and so to pay creditors shillings, instead of crowns. “Money does wear and
grow lighter by often telling over... It is the denomination and currency of the money that men regard
in bargaining, and not the quantity of silver...’Tis the public authority upon the metal that makes it
money.” (N. Barbon, l.c., pp. 29, 30, 25.)
39
“Une richesse en argent n’est que ... richesse en productions, converties en argent.” [“Monetary
wealth is nothing but ... wealth in products, transformed into money”] (Mercier de la Rivière, l.c.)
“Une valeur en productions n’a fait que changer de forme.” [“A value in the form of products, which
has merely changed its form.”] (Id., p. 486.)
40
“’Tis by this practice’ they keep all their goods and manufactures at such low rates.” (Vanderlint,
l.c., pp. 95, 96.)
41
“Money ... is a pledge.” (John Bellers: “Essays about the Poor, Manufactures, Trade, Plantations,
and Immorality,” Lond., 1699, p. 13.)
42
A purchase, in a “categorical” sense, implies that gold and silver are already the converted form of
commodities, or the product of a sale.
43
Henry III., most Christian king of France, robbed cloisters of their relics, and turned them into
money. It is well known what part the despoiling of the Delphic Temple, by the Phocians, played in
the history of Greece. Temples with the ancients served as the dwellings of the gods of commodities.
They were “sacred banks.” With the Phoenicians, a trading people par excellence, money was the
transmuted shape of everything. It was, therefore, quite in order that the virgins, who, at the feast of
the Goddess of Love, gave themselves up to strangers, should offer to the goddess the piece of money
they received.
43a
“Gold, yellow, glittering, precious gold!
Thus much of this,
will make black white; foul, fair;
Wrong, right; base, noble; old, young; coward, valiant.
... What this, you gods? Why, this
Will lug your priests and servants from your sides;
Pluck stout men’s pillows from below their heads;
This yellow slave
Will knit and break religions; bless the accurs’d;
Make the hoar leprosy ador’d; place thieves,
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And give them title, knee and approbation,
With senators on the bench; this is it,
That makes the wappen’d widow wed again:
... Come damned earth,
Though common whore of mankind.”
(Shakespeare: Timon of Athens.)
43b
“Money! Nothing worse
in our lives, so current, rampant, so corrupting.
Money — you demolish cities, root men from their homes,
you train and twist good minds and set them on
to the most atrocious schemes. No limit,
you make them adept at every kind of outrage,
every godless crimes — money!”
(Sophocles, Antigone.)
44
“The desire of avarice to draw Pluto himself out of the bowels of the earth.” (The Deipnosophists,
VI, 23, Athenaeus)
45
“Accrescere quanto più si può il numero de’venditori d’ogni merce, diminuere quanto più si puo il
numero dei compratori, questi sono i cardini sui quali si raggirano tutte le operazioni di economia
politica.” [“These are the pivots around which all the measures of political economy turn: the
maximum possible increase in the number of sellers of each commodity, and the maximum possible
decrease in the number of buyers”] (Verri, l.c., p. 52.)
46
“There is required for carrying on the trade of the nation a determinate sum of specifick money
which varies, and is sometimes more, sometimes less, as the circumstances we are in require.... This
ebbing and flowing of money supplies and accommodates itself, without any aid of Politicians.... The
buckets work alternately; when money is scarce, bullion is coined; when bullion is scarce, money is
melted.” (Sir D. North, l.c., Postscript, p. 3.) John Stuart Mill, who for a long time was an official of
the East India Company, confirms the fact that in India silver ornaments still continue to perform
directly the functions of a hoard. The silver ornaments are brought out and coined when there is a high
rate of interest, and go back again when the rate of interest falls. (J. S. Mill’s Evidence “Reports on
Bank Acts,” 1857, 2084.) According to a Parliamentary document of 1864 on the gold and silver
import and export of India, the import of gold and silver in 1863 exceeded the export by £19,367,764.
During the 8 years immediately preceding 1864, the excess of imports over exports of the precious
metals amounted to £109,652,917. During this century far more than £200,000,000 has been coined in
India.
47
The following shows the debtor and creditor relations existing between English traders at the
beginning of the 18th century. “Such a spirit of crudity reigns here in England among the men of
trade, that is not to be met with in any other society of men, nor in any other kingdom of the world.”
(“An Essay on Credit and the Bankrupt Act,” Lond., 1707, p. 2.)
48
It will be seen from the following quotation from my book which appeared in 1859, why I take no
notice in the text of an opposite form: “Contrariwise, in the process in M—C, the money can be
alienated as a real means of purchase, and in that way, the price of the commodity can be realised
before the use-value of the money is realised and the commodity actually delivered. This occurs
constantly under the every-day form of prepayments. And it is under this form, that the English
government purchases opium from the ryots of India.... In these cases, however, the money always
acts as a means of purchase.... Of course capital also is advanced in the shape of money.... This point
of view, however, does not fall within the horizon of simple circulation.” (“Zur Kritik, &c.,” pp. 119,
120.)