Cakbuthees. — On Mill's Fourth Fundamental Theorem respecting Capital. 27 



All writers on Political Economy call money wealth. By Mill's defini- 

 tion, and also by tliat whicli 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 pajper 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 woul(i 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, whUe, at 

 the same time, a river was passing the doors. Whether wise or not, still 

 it is 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 

 capitahst, who gives him such commodities 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 increase the total quantity in the world, of those commodities 

 which the miner took in exchange 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- 



