Wellington Philosophical Societi/. 537 



ABSTEACT, 



Mr. Mill defines •wealth to be " all useful and agreeable things which possess 

 exchangeable value," and capital to be " a stock previously accumulated of the products 

 of former labour." Mr. Carruthers proposes " to define wealth to be ' everything in the 

 world which is useful or agreeable to man,' and capital the 'ownership of that wealth.'" 

 The author sees no reason to depart from Mr. Mill's definitions, and does not tfeink Mr. 

 Carruthers' definition of capital any improvement upon that of Mr. Mill. There is 

 a sense in which nature's bounties may be converted into capital. By nature's bounties, 

 he means the rays of the sun, air, and water, and such-like things ; for example, the 

 owner of a piece of land by a running stream can at any time command a higher price 

 for his land than the owner of another piece, equally good in all other respects, which is 

 at a distance from water. Again, if the stream is of sufficient volume, especially if the 

 fall be considerable, the fortunate owner becomes possessed of an inexhaustible fund of 

 potential energy, which he may turn in various ways to his own use and benefit, and 

 thereby convert it into capital. He can apply the energy of the stream to drive machinery, 

 and by that means save the expense of a steam-engine and the fuel necessary to drive it. 

 He can, if need be, irrigate his lands and increase the produce of his fields. Every 

 farmer knows the value of a situation on the sunny side of a hill. The farmer thus 

 situated is able to avail himself of the earliest rays of the sun, and of the concentration 

 of those rays at a later period of the day to promote vegetation. He in fact converts the 

 potential energy of the sun's heat into a means of growing crops, and thereby increasing 

 his income. He will be able to produce crops earlier than, and superior in qtiality 

 to his neighbour whose land lies on the other side of the mountain range, and who 

 receives the sun's rays later in the day and at a more acute angle. 



The author then gives Ms reasons for disagreeing from Mr. Carruthers on two 

 or three points of importance. It is not a difficult matter to detect the fallacy that 

 by creating a paper currency we should be giving that which costs almost nothing for 

 the product of labour. This would be doing violence to a fundamental law. It is, in 

 fact, saying that we can give a penny for that which costs a pound. The error lies in 

 siij^posing that any power or authority, however great, can create a fictitious or artificial 

 value. This is sufficiently disproved by the fact that, wherever the experiment has been 

 tried, it has resulted in signal failure. The scheme of John Law, in France, in the 

 reign of Louis XV., is a case in point. But Law's scheme had one redeeming feature 

 as compared with the theory of Mr. Carruthers, inasmuch as his paper currency was 

 supposed to represent the possessions of the great landed proprietors. 



The author gives other instances of attempts to set up a paper currency, notably the 

 case of the United States. 



No legal enactment can override an universal law. The idea of a paper standard of 

 currency is not a new one, as will be seen by what has been already advanced. There 

 have been visionaries without number who have talked the wildest nonsense on this 

 subject. Yet all enlightened nations have found it necessary to adopt metallic standards. 

 And these metals are adopted simply because they are scarce and costly. They represent 

 work and labour done, and they are a convenient medium of exchange because they are 

 scarce, and requu-e the expenditure of energy to the value that they represent to obtain 

 them. Tens of thousands of men, with various mechanical appliances, are employed in 

 obtaining the precious metals, and others are employed, skilled artizans, with costly 

 machinery, to refine them and coin them into money. If one buys an article for a pound, 



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