The Prince George's enquirer and southern Maryland advertiser. (Upper Marlborough, Md.) 1882-1925, 1896-05-08
WHAT MONEY IS.
IT MUST BE PROPERTY AND HAVE
VALUE.

Articles That Served Well as Money
at One Period of Civilization Are
Too Clumsy for Use by Modern
Trading Nat1ons-Coinage and
Enthusiastically of the 16 to 1
Proposition-A Clear Exposition
of the Money Question by the
President of One of Our Great In
surance Companies.
One of the best short discussions on
the money question was made by
Colonel Jacob L. Greene in a speech
before the Hartford Board OF Trade
on March "a. Colonel Greene is presi-
dent of the Connecticut Mutual Life
Insurance Company, the largest
moneyed institution in New England.
| His speech contains so much of boiled
down common sense and states SO COM
pactly, accurately and clearly the true
uses and functions of money and coin
age that we quote the most of what he
said on these two branches of his gen.
eral subject "Our Currency Prob
LENS" We believe it will pay our
readers to read all we have quoted:
Trade exists before money. Money
is born of the necessities of trade, and
is simply it's instrument. And trade,
no matter how complex its forms, how
narrow or how wide its field, what the
range of its objects or the number or
character of it's instrumentalities and
incidents, is nothing else but the free,
willing exchange of one mans prop
erty for that of another. The funda-
mental fact and the everlasting moral
element in such exchanges is this: No
man willingly exchanges his own valu-
able commodity, his property, except
for another commodity, another piece
of property, of at least equal value to
him. The whole principle and motive
of honest trade, and the absolute con-
dition of permanently prosperous
trade, is property for property; sub
stance for substance; equal value for
agreed equal value. Anything else,
no matter how phrased, is robbery of
one or other of the parties, and is i'm
mediately destructive of real COM
merce, for it exhausts the party who is
made to get less than he is made to give
But the direct exchange or barter OF
scattered commodities by their respec-
tive owners is slow, laborious, costly
and announcement process. The prob.
lem of trade is to bring the scattered
owners of needed commodities and the
scattered consumers of them effectively
together, as seasonably, quickly and
cheaply as possible. All the manifold
instrumentalities of commerce are
merely devices to that one end. And
the first necessity to that end is some
form and kind of property SO useful
and desirable to all men, no matter
for what special reason, and so uni
formly and universally acceptable by
them that they will everywhere among
these producers and consumers readily
exchange for it any item of property
they wish to exchange, knowing that
it will, willingly and without loss
taken in exchange for any other item
of property they may happen to want
and whenever they may happen to
want it. That kind of property for
which all other kinds can be ex-
changed, which can buy and sell all
others, men call money. To serve this
use most effectively and economically,
it must possess in the highest attain
able degree certain qualities; it must
have value, real usefulness in itself /;
for men do not willingly trade valu-
able for valueless things; it must
keep it's value; for men will not trade
value for valueless thing merely be-
cause it once had value; they must
have the present substance and not the
mere tradition of value; it must be as
invariable in value as possible, that,
while it is kept on hand awaiting other
exchanges, it may lose as little as pos
sible of its power to buy other COM
modities it must be as nearly imper-
ishable and indestructible as possible ;
it must have as small bulk as possible
consistent with sufficient abundance,
both for convenience of handling and
for safety and cheapness of carriage ;
it must be of sort of equally valuable,
equally desirable, equally acceptable
! wherever men trade, else its purchas-
ing power is not everywhere equal,
and its function so far fails.
Wherever men have advanced be-
yond savagery, they have by custom
and common use adopted some then
available form of property, possessing
more or less of these qualities, as the
medium of their exchanges. So long
as, for any reason, that form has had
a recognized value and acceptability
as wide as the range of trade of that
time, it has served its purpose, even
if imperfectly. When its acceptability
has ceased, or has ceased to be COM
mensurate with the field of trade, it
has dropped out of use. History is
full of instances of disused and aban-
doned moneys.
Whenever particular form of prop
erty has served as a medium of ex-
change, it has necessarily become a
measure of the value of every item of
property exchanged by its interven-
ton. When coNries were the medium,
everything else was valued in cowries.
It was the same way with sheep. COWS,
cloths, hides, punches of shingles, etc.
So that intermediate kind or form of
property, by first exchanging for
which all other kinds of property are