CURRENCY AND COINAGE 181 



any foule language, for fear least they would bringe us 

 noe more.' Here we have the whole story of smartness 

 in trade among those who could only barter. We have 

 the price of iron, which they could not manufacture, in 

 terms of the live stock which they possessed in great 

 abundance. We have also the taking advantage of the 

 chance position of the sellers of iron to get as much of 

 that coveted commodity as possible for as little in the 

 way of live stock as possible. In our modern parlance, 

 they sent in their bills twice to those who could not or 

 would not resist that nefarious proceeding. I put the 

 matter thus to show the identity of reasoning in the 

 unprincipled savage and in the unprincipled civilized / 

 trader. 



There peeps out in this instance also a fact, which 

 indicates a great advance in the reasoning that originally 

 led to trade by barter. It will have been seen that 

 roughly the Hottentot put twice the value on his cows 

 that he did on his sheep. That is, his sheep and his 

 cows had for him a relative value, more or less fixed. 

 This is really an all-important advance in reasoning, 

 as it is not until the idea of relative value is reached 

 that the idea of currency can arise. 



I will carry this just a step further by an instance 

 within my own experience of trade by barter. I once 

 had to acquire for the Government about eight-and- 

 a-half acres of coco-nut covered land in the island of 

 Car Nicobar in the Bay of Bengal. I first carefully and 

 literally walked the boundaries, fixing them approxi- 

 mately with a prismatic compass to the great awe of 

 the sellers, and then gave them without hesitation what 

 they considered as much as they could dare to ask, 

 viz., twelve suits of black cloth, one piece of red cloth, 

 six^bags of rice, twenty packets of China tobacco, twelve 



