1894.] -I-<J* [Baird. 



build up thoroughly diversified industries at any cost and any sacrifice of 

 present apparent cheapness. On this impregnable rock does the pro- 

 tectionist plant himself and defy the enemy, be he philosopher or be he 

 boor. 



Money the Instrument op Association. 



By means of the brilliant, all-pervading sunlight, which the recogni- 

 tion of the true place held by the law of association at the very founda- 

 tion of society sheds upon the societary problem, the function of money 

 assumes a new position, and the accumulated rubbish of centuries which 

 lias covered up and obscured it is completely brushed aside. In no other 

 direction than that of the appreciation of the life-giving function of 

 money, that of ministering to man's need for association and combina- 

 tion with his fellow-men, can we so confidently look for the emancipa- 

 tion of man himself 



Starting from the basic law of association, the Master has happily 

 termed money the instrument of association, and it thus ceases to be the 

 dead, inert thing which it has so long been stfppnsed by the Greshams, 

 the Smiths, the Hutnes, the Ricardos, the Huskissons, the Peels, the 

 Overstones, the Mills, the assumption economists generally, and the 

 army of so-called "statesmen," to be. Money, as the instrument of 

 association, becomes a vitalizer, a producer, a utilizer of human labor 

 power ; a large volume of money, thus, under certain circumstances, being 

 quite consistent with cheap production, as will be made more apparent in 

 the sequel. Acknowledgment of the law of association as a basis, furnishes 

 the only rational means of accounting for a host of problems touching 

 money, which are of everyday occurrence and observation, although in 

 direct antagonism to the theories of the philosophers. 



The daily life of a civilized people, involving such countless millions of 

 acts of association or commerce, such myriads of compositions, decompo- 

 sitions and rccompositions of services, commodities and ideas, a medium 

 having the qualities of universal acceptability and of almost unlimited 

 divisibility and aggregation, is absolutely necessary to that life. In the 

 early stages of society, and in isolated communities, there is but little 

 societary life, and there man is dependent upon but comparatively few of 

 his fellow -men, while in a city like London, Paris, New York, Philadel- 

 phia or Cliicago there are many thousands of individuals, each of whom 

 daily calls for the services of millions of men. Indeed, the purchaser of 

 a co])y of the Herald, Tribune, Press or Ledger, in making that purchase 

 calls for the services of the millions of men who have, in any way, con- 

 tributed to the production of one of these papers, even so remotely as by 

 making the material of which the railroads or telegraphs have been con- 

 structed, by means of which the raw materials of the newspaper and the 

 news have been conveyed all the way through from the miners of the 

 coal, and the smelters of the metals, in the machinery used ni its produc- 

 tion, to the makers of the paper and the type, to the compositors, press- 



PUOC. AMER. PHILOS. SOC. XXXIII. 144. R PRINTED MARCH 30, 1894. 



