The Portland daily press., 1895-06-18
HOW GOLD AND SILVER BECAME
MONEY.

buyers ana sellers generally, unally
confirmed by positive law, designated
specific quantities of gold and silver to
be money, that is, to be the symbol and
representative of universal value-of value
in any desirable thing-the substances
so designated, necessarily, as the conse-
quence of such employment, took on
qualities and values entirely distinct from
their merchandise value and that ulti-
mately wholly supplanted their merchan-
disc value.
No tool that man has ever invented,
from his primitive hammer to his modern
steam engine, has wrought for him such
magical effects in providing for him pow
or, knowledge and comfort as this tool of
money. 1t took time to perfect it. There
must have been at first world of hag-
CLING as to quantity, guessed at by hand
hefting, by the Judgment of experts-as
when was boy, before the use of hay
scales, ton Of hay was sold on the judg-
ment of some expert who looked at the
load, walked round it, and punched it
but finally determined by weighing it as
in the case of hay. Disputes too about
the purity of the metals must have been
settled by some kind of rude tests, that
have passed out of knowledge. But silver
and gold could not have become, as they
| long have been, an efficient instrument of
a goldsmith or some private person, ulti
| mately the sovereign government had
tested both weight and fineness and
stamped upon the coins, the fractions of
abstract value of which they should be
| the symbol
Then too this circumstance greatly i'm
peded the development of primitive COM
merce. The men that had to sell com
modities of real value as corn, cloth, cat
tie, when offered in exchange articles
purely ornamental, like silver and gold,
whose value was created not by necessity
but by fancy, did not want The ornaments
but did want some other necessary. They
had to look round and find persons who
wanted the ornaments and not the neces-
stiles of life to take the gold and silver
| off their hands and give for them equiva-
| lents of real value. There was this diff
Guilty about doing this, that then as now,
| the dudes that wore ornaments and had
| q passion for them, were not workers
and consequently had not produced any
corn. cloth or cattle, or commodity of
| intrinsic worth to give to redeem the
| money, and the scrubs. who did the work
and produced the values, had no fancy
for the ornaments. 1t was not until
sta mped gold and silver disks had gained
confidence as the representatives of value
in any purchasable thing, that men
were willing to receive them and give in
exchange the products of their labor
Once become acceptable for such purpose,
the monetary use of them necessarily
eclipsed. absorbed and supplanted those
ornamental uses, which We're and are the
basis of their intrinsic and commercial
value.
The children of each generation re-enact
the stages of development of the human
race. Show child a handful of money
copper, silver, bank notes-and he will be
more delighted with the gift of q new
bright cent, than If you give him hand
full of blackened dollars OF roll of ragged
bills. He is not old enough to understand
the purely representative and symbolic
nature of monetary values and that coins
are worth the abstract values they repre-
sent He has the sayage's idea of gold