CannurHERS.—On Mills Fourth Fundamental Theorem respecting Capital, 27 
All writers on Political Economy call money wealth. By Mill's defini- 
tion, and also by that which I have suggested, it is so. It is something 
useful, as an implement of commerce, and possesses exchangeable value. 
By my definitions it would also be called a commodity, but it is a com- 
modity of which the actual cost is great and the proper cost is nothing. 
If the several nations composing the community who use gold and silver 
as a medium of exchange, passed a law that in future these should not 
be money but that certain printed pieces of paper should take their place, 
and that after the present holders of money had been presented with one of 
those pieces of paper in exchange for each sovereign he possessed, no more 
should be printed except a small defined number to be printed annually in 
order to cover expected losses and to meet the expected increased demand 
due to increased commerce, we should have a new commodity costing nearly 
nothing and which would possess all the useful qualities possessed by 
money. ; 
Metallic money is in fact like the water made by the chemist, a costly 
commodity, which is useful in the same manner, and only to the same 
degree, as another commodity which costs nothing. 
It is not more wise to use gold as a medium of exchange, where paper 
would do as well, and to employ an army of skilful, intelligent, and enter- 
prising workmen to dig it out of the ground, than it would be to employ 
the same men in quarrying minerals containing oxygen and hydrogen, and 
then to hire a chemist to mint them into water for household use, while, at 
the same time, a river was passing the doors. Whether wise or not, still 
itis done. Workmen are employed digging gold; when a man gets a 
nugget, he is entitled, by long established custom, to be rewarded by a tax, 
levied on the whole world, proportioned to the weight of the nugget. He 
has no trouble in levying this tax; he simply takes his nugget to a 
capitalist, who gives him such commotie in exchange for it as the miner 
may choose, and the nugget thenceforward, whether coined into money or 
not, is a token certifying that the bearer has paid directly, or at second or 
later hand a tax due by the whole community. Like all debts contracted 
by the community for unproductive expenditure, this debt is twice paid, or 
rather is still due although it has been already paid. The finding of the 
nugget did not inerease the total quantity in the world, of those commodities 
which the miner took in exehange for it. All that he got must therefore 
have been taken from some one who would otherwise have got them. The 
consumers of those kinds of commodities, therefore, paid the debt, but 
they paid it to the manufacturer of the commodities, who got it in the 
shape of higher prices, instead of to the capitalist who advanced the goods 
to the miner. The latter was not paid, but the token he held being a con- 
