Small shells in their natural form, especially those of the moneta, have for ages been the currency of numerous tribes in Southern Asia and Western Africa. Some conception of the extent of their circu lation may be formed from the fact that not long since the imports of these cowry-shells from India into England for reshipment to the African coast, where they are used for buying ivory and palm oil, amounted to a thousand tons a year. The Dentalium, a small shell found on the north west coast of North America, is prized by the natives, and has been employed in exchanges so long and over so extended an area that speci mens of it have been disinterred from the Mound-builders' constructions in the upper valley of the Ohio.
Mexican Mexico and Central America commerce was active; every city held its fairs, and the merchants were an active and most respected class, iu some districts (Acatlan) the most successful trader being elected as the ruler. Their principal medium of exchange was cacao-beans, themselves a valued article of food, but passing at a conven tional value. They are said by some antiquaries to have had a copper coinage, thin plates of that metal, cut into semilunar pieces of equal size, having sometimes been found in hoards in large numbers. If this were established, it would be the nearest approach to a metallic currency known among American tribes, although the natives of Vancouver Island and the adjacent shores have for ages possessed plates of native copper, ham mered into sheets six to twelve inches square, and appear to recognize them as units of value in barter.
The Precious are called the precious metals have, as metals, a minor value in the arts of utility. The estimate put upon them from remote times and in so many nations is almost wholly artificial. That it is ancient, we know from the Egyptian paintings, where merchants are represented weighing out gold and silver in exchange for goods, and from the references in the book of Genesis to Abraham paying "shekels of silver, current money with the merchant," for the land he bought (Gen. xxiii.). In those days, and for a long time subsequent, weight alone was the measure of the shekels or other units applied to metallic money. Practically, it is so to this clay, as is seen in the Bank of England, which neither pays nor receives coins except by weight. This method, however, is so inconvenient in the pressure of ordinary business that some inven tive genius in ancient Lydia or Phrygia bethought him of dividing the metal into pieces of equal weight and alloy and stamping alike those of the same value. These were the coins in electrum, five-sixths gold and
one-sixth silver, said to be the first ever manufactured. The idea was well received, and in a few centuries had not only extended throughout the civilized world of that date, but had been carried to a degree of per fection which, from its artistic side, has never since been equalled. The Greek coinage of the age of the Macedonian conquerors for beauty of design and execution stands peerless in the history of numismatics.
Gradually all other metals gave way as currency to those first chosen by the Oriental coiners—gold and silver—or at least became restricted to narrow, local usage. Tin—which in ancient times was coined among the Romans, Sicilians, and Britons—is still employed for small denominations in Holland. Leaden coins, once not uncommon among the Mediterranean nations, now linger only in the distant kingdom of Burmah in Farther India. Iron, which in the form of spikes and bars was once the coinage of Greece and Britain, no longer passes current except among some rude African tribes. In modern times platinum in Russia and nickel in the United States have had limited application in mints, but neither seems destined to general popularity.
Paper and silver are, and are likely to remain, the chief materials of currency and the standards of value. Although, as has been said, of no signal practical service to man, they are of some intrinsic worth. Therefore it was a decided advance in the true theory of the medium of exchange, although nothing more than a reversion to the first form, the painted strip of leather, peatnia, when an emperor of China in the eighth century stamped a certain value on a piece of mulberry-bark and issued an edict that any of his subjects who should refuse to accept it at this value should be forthwith decapitated! This was in strict accordance with the Aristotelian definition of money—" something that has its value by law and not by nature " (see p. i 15)—and is the first historic example of paper money, which has now obtained such wide acceptance throughout the world. That medium of exchange will, however, be always the stand ard, governing all others, which is most widely recognized as such; and therefore at present gold alone is and must long remain that by which others are appraised. Paper money can only be a valuable currency to the extent that it can be converted into gold. The idea of a " national " currency is a delusion and an impossibility.