Paintings, statuary, musical instruments, rare jewels, beautiful houses, elegant apartments, elaborate decorations, grand churches, lofty spires, monuments, and works of art, may be created and retained, sought for and enjoyed as a constant source of pleasure and use, and may be kept and preserved, from generation to gen- eration ; but money is not a work of art, a thing of beauty, or an object of utility. It is the only article in the world that is obtained for the pur- pose of getting rid of as soon as possible. It has no useful or ornamental purpose in itself; it is neither a necessity nor a luxury, and strict- ly comes within no category of “property,” as we enumerate articles of value, except so far as the material out of which it is created has a value for use in the manufacture of jewels, plate, or other commodities. What is, then, this strange and anomalous thing, which has no value, and yet which has all value? Let us trace it to its source, and see what it was in the beginning, and what it has since become.
All writers on money agree that its use arose from trade; that trade in its earlier stages was simple barter—the exchange of one commodity for another; that barter was soon found to be difficult and impracticable, and that some one commodity was naturally chosen as a common representative of value and medium of exchange. Whatever this commodity was—whether an ox, a sheep, a shell, a stone, a skin, or a piece of shining metal—would be money ; the only requi- site being that it should be a common “medium of exchange,” and at the same time a “stand- ard,” or “measure,” by which all other com- modities should be valued.
A careful examination of the history of na- tions, from the earliest periods, reveals the fact that two distinct classes of commodities have been successively used by mankind as mediums of exchange, to wit:
(1.) Articles of food and clothing.
(2.) Trinkets, jewels, or personal ornaments, or the material of which they are composed.
The former were used in the early stages of civilization, and are but little removed from actual barter. The latter have gradually de- veloped and culminated into coined money, as now used. For the purpose of noting the growth of the money-‘dea from its earliest Stages, let us briefly review its history:
I.
ARTICLES OF FOOD AND CLOTHING AS MONEY.
The most rudimentary state of industry is that in which subsistence is gained by hunting wild animals. Accordingly, furs or skins were employed as money in many ancient nations.* A passage in the book of Jobt has been cited as clearly implying that skins passed as money among the early Oriental nations. The Hud- son Bay Company, in its traffic with the North American Indians, also found that skins and furs were the most satisfactory medium of ex- change, long after the use of coins had become known to the Indians.{ Leather money circu- lated in Russia as late as the reign of Peter the Great, and leather was also the earliest money used at Rome, Lacedemon, and Carthage.§
In the next higher stage of civilization—the pastoral state—sheep and cattle naturally form the most valuable and negotiable kind of prop- erty. In the Homeric poems, oxen are dis- tinctly and repeatedly mentioned as the com- modity by which other objects were valued. The arms of Diomed were stated to be worth nine oxen; the tripod, the first prize for wres- tlers, was valued at twelve oxen; while a wom- an captive was valued at four oxen only, from which we may infer that women were not so “dear” then as now. So general was the cus- tom among pastoral nations, of using oxen and sheep as the standard of value, that even the price of gold and silver was graded, or meas- ured, by them. The grandson of Abraham bought land, and paid one hundred pieces of silver for it. The Greek word “pieces,” as used in the text, meaning “lambs,” the price paid for the land was one hundred “lambs” of silver. Each of Job’s friends, on a certain occasion, brought him an “ear-ring,” as well as a “lamb,” or “piece,” of money. The silver was valued by the lambs, instead of the lambs by the sil- ver; the lamb, and not the silver, was the standard of value, for silver had not yet been “monetized.” The early Roman coins bear images of cattle and sheep, and were called pecunia, money, from fecus, a flock of sheep or cattle. Our word “pecuniary” is, of course, de- rived from the same word. It is also said that the term “fee,” used in payment of a sum of money, is nothing but the Saxon word /zoh, meaning alike money and cattle; as, also, the German word vieh, which still bears the orig- inal meaning of cattle. The origin of the term “specie,” so unfitly applied to metallic money, has also been traced to the early use of cattle, and other “species,” as money, and may be cited as evidence of the fact that gold and sil- ver were not the subject of “special creation” as money, but the mere result of “natural se- lection.”
- Jevons, Money and the Mechanism of Exchange.
t “Skin for skin, yea, all that a man hath, will a man give for his own life.”—Job, ii, 4.
t Whymper, 7vavels in Alaska, p. 225.
§ Jevons, Money and the Mech of Exchang
