BARTER. When one commodity is exchanged directly for another, without the employment of any instrument of exchange which shall determine the value of the merchandise, the transaction is called Barter. All trade resolves itself into an exchange of commodities ; but the commercial exchangers of one com modity for another effect their exchanges by a money-payment, determined by a market-value. This is a sale. Swift, in his attack upon Wood's halfpence, which he considered as destructive of the money standard of value, says, "I see nothing left us but to barter our goods, like the wild Indians, with each other." The general evils of such a state are obvious ; and they create dishonest attempts in one exchanger to cheat the other. The North American Indians obtain a few of the comforts and luxuries of civilized life, by exchanging skins for manufactured articles. The Indians meet the traders; each man divides his skins into louti which have a relative value to each other, as that two otter skins are equal to one beaver. For one lot he wants a gun, or a looking-glass, or a blanket, or an axe. The trader has the articles to give the Indian in exchange. Twenty beaver skins are given rbr a : ; the gun costs a pound m Birming ; the beaver skins are worth more than twenty times the amount in London. If the Indians were brought into more general contact with the exchangers of civilised life, they would regulate their exchanges by a money-standard, and would obtain a fairer value for their skins.
The term barter seems to have been derived from the languages of southern Europe: baratar, Spanish ; barattare, Italian,—which signify to cheat as well as to barter : hence, also our word Bar ratry. The want of a standard of value in all transactions of barter, gives occa sion to that species of overreaching which prevails from an ignorance of the real principles of trade, by which all exchan gers are benefited through an exchange. The examples of barter, however, without any reference to some standard of value, become more and more uncommon as the commercial intercourse of mankind advances. A skin of corn, or a stone vessel of corn, among some of the Indian tribes, is established as a standard of value; councils are held to determine the rate of exchange ; and a beaver-skin is thus held to be worth so many more skins of corn than a blanket This is an approach to a standard of value, which almost takes the transaction out of the condition of being a barter. In the trade carried on between Ramie and China, the exchanges of merchandise are directly effected, but the comparative value of the merchandise is determined by a money-standard. This is clearly
not barter. The Indian corn-measure of value is something like the animal measure which formerly existed in this country, when certain values being affixed to cattle and slaves, they became an instrument of exchange, under the lame of living money. Amongst the northern nations skins used to be a ard of value: the word rdha, which sig nifies money in the Esthonian language, has not lost its primitive signification of skins amongst the Laplanders. When nations come to use any standard of value, whether skins, as in northern or dhourra (pounded millet, t, inn vulgare), as in Nubia, or shells, as in parts of India, their transactions gradually lose the character of barter. If wages are paid in articles of consump tion, as in some districts of England, the transaction is called is the French for barter. [Tama &Irma.] The exchanges of a civilized amongst themselves, or with countries, are principally carried on by bills of exchange; the actual money payment in a country by no means repre sents the amount of its commercial trans actions. If any sudden convulsion arise which interrupts the confidence upon which credit is founded, bills of exchange cease to be negotiable, and exchangers demand money payments. The coin of a commercial country being insufficient to represent its transactions, barter would be the natural consequence if such a dis estrous state of things were to continue. Thus, when Mr. Huskisson declared in 1825 that the panic of thatyear placed this country " within forty-eight hours of barter," he meant that the credit of the state would have been so reduced, that its notes would not have been received, or its coin, except for its intrinsic value as an article of exchange ; and that the, bills of individuals would have been in the same case. Barter, in this case, would be a back- I ward movement towards uncivilization. .BASTARD. The conjectures of ety mologists on the origin of this word are various and unsatisfactory. Its root has been sought in several languages:—the Greek, Saxon, German, Welsh, Icelandic, and Persian. For the grounds on which the pretensions of all these languages are respectively supported, we refer the cu rious to the glossaries of Ducange and SpAmen, the more recent one of Boucher, and to the notes on the title Bastard in Dodd and Gwillim's edition of Bacon's Abridgment, vol. i., p. 746.