MONDAY 



3885 



MONEY 



1916. The Y. M. C. A. building, the post office, 

 Aberdeen High School, the Moncton Hospital, 

 erected in 1904, and the offices of the govern- 

 ment railways are noteworthy structures. H.V.B. 



MONDAY, mun'day, the name of the second 

 day of the week, is from the Anglo-Saxon 

 monandaeg, which means the moon's day. In 

 ancient times each of the seven days was dedi- 

 cated to a god or goddess, and Monday was 

 sacred to the goddess of the moon. 



Black Monday is the name applied histor- 

 ically to Easter Monday, April 14, 1360, when 

 the troops of King Edward III suffered so bit- 

 terly from the cold as they lay before the city 

 of Paris that many men died on their horses. 

 The expression has come to be applied to any 

 Easter Monday, as in the following line from 

 Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice: 



Then it was not for nothing that 



My nose fell a-bleeding on Black Monday last. 



Blue Monday, so called in Bavaria because of 

 the color of the church decorations, is the Mon- 

 day before Lent. In America, the holiday 

 known as Labor Day (which see) always falls 

 on the first Monday in September. 



MONESSEN, mones"n, PA., an industrial 

 city in Westmoreland County, in the south- 

 western part of the state, thirty-nine miles 

 south of Pittsburgh. It is situated -on the 

 Monongahela River and is served by the Pitts- 

 burgh & Lake Erie Railroad. Monessen was 

 settled and incorporated in 1898, and the in- 

 crease in population from 11,775 in 1910 to 

 21,630 (Federal estimate) in 1916 indicates its 

 rapid growth. Only thirty-five per cent of this 

 number are Americans, Slavs, Finns and Italians 

 predominating in the foreign element. The 

 area is about one square mile. 



Monessen is noted for its large steel and 

 sheet and tin-plate industries; the former em- 

 ploys over 5,500 people and the latter 1,500. 

 Besides these the city has foundries, machine 

 shops, a woven-wire fence factory and lumber 

 yards; the products of all these are shipped in 

 large quantities. In the vicinity are found de- 

 posits of coal and iron ore. The name Mones- 

 sen associates the Monongahela River with 

 Essen, the Prussian city of steel fame, where 

 are located the great munition works of the 

 Krupps. A.W.B. 



THE STORY OF MONEY 



, ONEY, mun'i. If you were to jour- 

 ney to the northwest of Canada, to the farthest 

 of the Hudson's Bay Company's trading posts, 

 you would find a pocketful of coins or five- 

 dollar bills almost useless. If you asked the 

 storekeeper the price of a certain amount of 

 coffee he would answer, "Two and a half beaver 

 skins," and if you then gave him three beaver 

 skins he would hand you a small marked stick 

 for your change. Any person in that district 

 would take the stick from you in payment for 

 supplies, but probably nowhere except at the 

 store could you induce anyone to accept the 

 money which you had brought with you. 



In the world's history many different sub- 

 stances have been utilized for money. At first, 

 of course, all exchange was by barter or trade. 

 If one man was a shepherd and his neighbor a 

 fruit-grower, a sheep would be given in return 

 for grapes or olives. But perhaps the owner 



of the sheep would not want at one time all the 

 fruit that a whole animal would purchase. So 

 the fruit-grower, since in those days no one 

 knew how to write, would give him a number 

 of pretty stones as tokens that he still owed 

 him fruit. Or perhaps he would give him a 

 quantity of grain, salt or some other generally 

 desired commodity of equal value to the fruit 

 still due. Some of the American Indians gave 

 wampum or shells as tokens, and the first white 

 settlers in Virginia traded with both warnpum 

 and tobacco. 



The gold and silver, nickel, copper and paper 

 money of to-day are not different in principle 

 from those older means of exchange. Gold coins 

 are in a real sense like the beaver-skins and 

 the grain, salt and tobacco currency given in 

 return for objects of equal value. The smaller 

 coins, of silver or other metals, are token money, 

 like the Hudson's Bay Company's sticks or the 



