326 Science of Money. [July? 



metals. There is allusion in early history, for instance, to 

 live stock being used as money. In modern times the early 

 Virginian settlers used tobacco for the like purpose, and the 

 eastern Asiatics still use brick tea, and the Abyssinians 

 cakes of salt. And again we have the notable case — 

 solecism among exceptions we may call it — of the cowrie 

 money. But these exceptional moneys are always the pro- 

 duel: of exceptional circumstances. They arise, excluding 

 for the moment the special case of the cowries, only in thin, 

 scattered, or merely pastoral communities. Such money 

 could find no life in any ordinary aggregate of intelligent 

 industry, with its conspicuous factories of the common 

 metals, and even, failing them, of many other articles more 

 suitable for a temporary holding and for exchange pur- 

 poses, than a sheep or a piece of tobacco. The drift of the 

 market, as I have termed it, would be peremptory, decisive 

 in this respect. Where there is no market in this sense of 

 industrial human aggregation, this regular effect is not 

 of course forthcoming. But all these articles of irregular 

 money, so to call them, have ever had the main requisite of 

 a general appreciation and use as articles of trade, giving 

 the users the idea of realisableness or ready negociability, 

 and thus meeting for each person the convenience of the 

 hour or of the special case in circumstances probably 

 of very limited choice. Such money, however, has generally 

 at best held but a locally partial or a divided sway ; 

 and it is only in some secondary sense of this kind that we 

 can interpret the old classic allusions to sheep and cattle 

 that have come down to us. Cowrie money stands on a 

 different ground. Its origin as money is doubtless attri- 

 butable to the fancies of children, protracted into the later 

 life of simple peoples, whose minds never rise greatly beyond 

 those of children. The case is as though our schoolboys 

 had preserved into later years their strongly impressed 

 notions of the exchangeable value of their marbles, so that 

 this money of boyhood's transactions had passed into those 

 of mature life. 



Lastly, let me advert to yet another subject, fraught, like 

 some of the preceding, with popular misconception. I 

 might entitle this closing paragraph, " the cost of a 

 currency." People have not usually thought of money, 

 indispensable as all admit it to be, as none the less a costly 

 instrument to society. We have seen, however, that the 

 tendency in each individual is to economise money — to find 

 his advantage in doing with as little of it as possible ; 

 and hence the whole community is gainer by this course. 



