valid mediums of exchange)” (v. Phillippovich). These commodities are the metals, and with increasing property the precious metals. Then comes the guarantee of the community for a given weight and given content. In Asia Minor “coinage developed by marking pieces of metal of a given weight with the arms of the city community, which was coining, as with a kind of common stamp” (Nasse). This guarantee is essentially a moral one, and therefore in fact always religious. The word Moneta which has gained universal significance by its passing into English (money), comes from the temple of Juno Moneta, the original Roman mint. But with the guarantee of public credit there is opened the door to deception and falsehood; here come in the historical debasements of the currency, which have played such a discreditable part, chiefly in times of transition to the modern state. The State, generally represented in its first phase by princes and their war-chests, lends value to the coins, not so much by moral guarantee as by force, which makes the universal medium of exchange into a legal medium of payment. The nature of this constraint first shows itself in its pure form in giving value to paper, by which printed notes are made into legal tender and are thereby also made current; their actual value being conditioned not so much by the moral as by the mercantile credit of the Government. This mercantile credit is the basis of whatever value substitutes for money may have, whether they are written, printed, or lithographed paper. It makes also conventional paper-money (whether so-called or not) in the manifold forms of circulating credit, and it is this which we regard as the earlier stage of a state papermoney. Here belong “bills of exchange, orders, cheques, coupons, stamps,” and characteristically also “convertible state paper-money” (A. Wagner). Quite similar again is the bank-note, which is issued by a bank having a monopoly of notes, when the State has handed over to the bank the power of regulating the notes. But the management of every large bank, in a far greater degree than the management of any State, takes place according to scientific principles, especially according to the rules of the calculus of probabilities. We may call the bank-note (in accordance with its idea) scientific money. It is for this reason that philosophical schemes for a reconstruction of economic society are so often and easily connected with the thought of a purely credit-system, which is conceived of as a synthesis of the natural and the money system. The social value-sign would—like paper-money—derive its validity only from the social will;
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