belong to the domain of science-Variations which do-Practical considerations for the regulation of money-Effect in the United States of an absolutely fixed sum-) capita of population—Actual movement of population and money during the past century-Had money been regulated instead of being left to commerce, chance, and political contention, the THE SCIENCE OF MONEY. CHAPTER I. THE UNIT OF MONEY IS ALL MONEY. Origin of the word money-Its employment with reference to any period before B.C. 273 an anachronism-Money, or nomisma, meant originally the whole numbers of money-This was its classical meaning -During the Empire and the Dark Ages money came to mean one or more coins-This is the meaning attached to it in the laws of modern nations, because these laws òriginated in the Dark Ages-During the Renaissance it meant the whole quantity, not numbers, of money—This is the meaning sometimes attached to it by the Economists, because their systems date from the Renaissance-Incongruous nature of this meaning-In speaking with precision, money can only mean all the numbers of money of a given country-Teleologically, the unit of money is all money. MONEY, as a generic term for the common means of payment, the medium of exchange, the unit or measure of value, the expression of price, the Thing in the fractions of which either law or custom makes taxes, fines, debts, services, or exchanges, payable, was first used—that is, the word was first used-towards the end of the third century before Christ. What we now call money was named by the ancient Hindoos "cash," from karshápana, a coin; by the archaic Romans "aes," meaning bronze, which was the material of B their coins; by the Greeks "nomisma," meaning numbers; and by the Romans of the Commonwealth "nummus," from the Greek nomos and nomisma. In the year B.c. 273, the Romans, in gratitude to the goddess Juno, for an alleged timely warning which saved them from defeat in battle, surnamed her Moneta-from monere, to warn, and erected a temple in her honour which they called by her new name. Soon after, when the spoil of Tarentum was carried to Rome, this building was used as a mint, and its productions came to take the name of "moneta.1 199 It appears probable that moneta was at first used only in a collective sense, meaning all money, or the numerical sum of the entire coinage. This was certainly the meaning originally attached to nomisma, which was the predecessor of the word moneta. This meaning of money-namely, all money, or the whole sum or numbers of money within a given legal jurisdiction or a given country-will herein be distinguished as the Classical. Later on, that is to say during the Roman imperial era, the term money was applied to any considerable portion of the coinage, and still later to smaller portions; but not yet to a single coin. During that lingering decay of the social fabric which 1 From these circumstances it follows that the use of the term money with reference to any period previous to the dates referred to is an anachronism. Such an instance occurs in the English translation of Genesis, when Abraham is said to have paid for Sarah's grave “four hundred shekels of silver, current money with the merchant." (Gen. xxiii. 9, 13, 16). followed the downfall of liberty in Rome, every combination, both of things and ideas, gradually resolved itself into its original elements. This means of warding off impending dissolution Nature offers not only to composite things and ideas, but also to words. Isolation affords a refuge from which social existence may again emerge. The shattered trunk of a tree may survive after its branches and fruit are destroyed. The Roman Empire split into two, then into many fragments, each of which was called a kingdom. In the course of time these kingdoms became divided into countships or dukedoms, and the latter subdivided into still smaller realms. Every institution which was composed of a plurality of men or things fell to pieces in a similar way. The senate perished, the tribunals of justice disappeared, the corporations or collegii vanished, the use of annuities and life tables was forgotten, the census fell into oblivion, even the organization of armies ceased; and counts and kings alike decided their quarrels by single combat. Everything of a joint ownership, as a public road, an aqueduct, or a water-ditch, everything of a composite structure, from a sailing ship down to a piece of paper, every art which depended upon the association of labour, from the representation of a drama down to the blowing of glass, was lost. The same course of disintegration attended the history of institutions, of ideas, of thoughts. The world, the commonwealth, the republic, the nation, the social state, the people, public opinion, commerce, credit, society—all these were ideas or institutions known to the Greeks and Romans in the widest sense. Says Pliny, "I do not suppose that the land is actually wanting, or that the earth has not the form of a globe; but that on each side the uninhabitable parts have not been discovered"1. In the Dark Ages the world had dwindled to little beyond the compass of southern and western Europe; the commonwealth was the duke's courtyard; and as for the social state, public opinion, commerce and credit, these things died out entirely. Words followed a similar process of decomposition. Their meanings gradually contracted, so that from embracing composite and collected ideas, they came to have only simple and single ones. They degenerated from forcible to weak; from grand to petty. Many of the words were lost altogether. During the Renaissance which followed the Dark Ages, a few of them revived, to puzzle the modern philologist with their successive diminuendo and crescendo gamuts of meanings. Among these was money. The descent of the word money from its original meaning of the whole numbers of the medium of exchange, or the whole coinage, to the feudal meaning of a single coin, piece, or fraction of the unit of value, is clearly traceable in words 1 "Natural Hist.," Bohn's ed., ii. 112. Pliny also quotes Eratosthenes and Hipparchus, both of whom knew, not only that the earth was a sphere, they had even computed its circumference; the former at 252,000 stadii, the latter at 277,000. The rotundity of the earth had long previously been proved by Thales, B.C. 636. |