Principles of Political Economy with Applications to Social Philosophy

ing by private individuals. Indeed, the government's guarantee was often the only one that would be trusted—a trust, however, which it very often ill deserved. Profligate governments have, until a very late period, never hesitated, for the sake of cheating their creditors, to grant all other debtors a license to cheat theirs through the shallow and impudent trick of lowering the standard. This is the least subtle form of dishonesty, which consists of calling a shilling a "pound," so that a debt of a hundred pounds can be cleared by the payment of a hundred shillings. It would have been as simple a plan—and would have served the purpose just as well—to have enacted that the number "a hundred" should always be interpreted to mean "five." This would have achieved the same reduction in all financial contracts and would have been no more shameless. Such policy tricks have not entirely ceased to be suggested, but they have ceased to be practiced, except occasionally through the medium of paper money, in which case the true character of the transaction is slightly less obvious because the subject matter is more obscure.

§ 3. Money, when its use has become habitual, is the medium through which the incomes of the different members of the community are distributed, and the measure by which they estimate their possessions. As it is always by means of money that people provide for their various needs, a powerful association grows in their minds, leading them to regard money as "wealth" in a more specific sense than any other item. Even those who spend their lives producing the most useful objects acquire the habit of regarding those objects as important primarily because they can be exchanged for money. A person who parts with money to obtain goods—unless he intends to resell them—appears to the imagination to be making a worse bargain than a