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are. I do not look upon mere paper as money at all, in any 
proper sense of the word. I think my friend, Professor Perry, has 
stated it rightty: “It is a lie on the face of it. 11 It does not pre¬ 
tend to he money. It purports to be a note; and it is no more 
money than a note is money. And it will cease to be money for 
all uses whatsoever when men cease to believe it will be paid. We 
now hope that some time it will be redeemed, and hence it passes 
from hand to hand. It will be with us as with the confederates. 
When payment was not likely to be made, their money ceased to be 
of value. So it was in the revolution. A treasury note is not 
money, and never can become money except it rests back upon true 
money, or something which represents money. 
If we look back at the beginning, we find men exchanging one 
thing for another, and that is simple exchange; afterwards ex¬ 
pressing the price of things in oxen, and using oxen as money. 
There is no difficulty in using them as money, except that it is in¬ 
convenient to transfer them and impossible to divide them. An ox 
can be made money,—as an Arab says “ it is worth so many 
camels”—though lacking a great deal of convenience because not 
easily transferred or divided. Because of this difficulty there came 
to creep into its place a commodity which is easily transferred or 
divided, namely gold, and that passed by weight. Abraham 
weighed it out. It was bullion, and it came to take the place of 
oxen, camels, &c., because it was more convenient than they. 
So it came to crowd them out. Then it was found inconvenient 
to fix the value of gold by weighing it every time. Thus it be¬ 
came necessary to mark the value of the gold so it need not be 
weighed. 
Governments have often tried to give a false value to gold. Money 
is a real commodity though it has a higher value assigned it than it is 
really worth. No government in the world has ever been able to 
maintain permanently in coin an essentially higher value than that 
of mere bullion. The strongest governments have always failed in 
this. England and all other countries have failed when they have 
tried to give a greater value to it than the value of gold as a 
commodity. We can get our gold no cheaper than to work 
just here and give our products in exchange for gold. It will cost 
us as much labor to dig for gold, as to raise wheat and exchange it 
for gold, because there is that amount of labor represented in gold, 
