While Ricardo elaborated Hume's theory, Adam Smith registered the results of Steuart's investigations as dead facts. Adam Smith applied the Scotch saying that "mony mickles mak a muckle" even to his spiritual wealth, and therefore concealed with petty care the sources to which he owed the little out of which he tried to make so much. More than once he prefers to break off the point of the discussion, whenever he feels that an attempt on his part clearly to formulate the question would compel him to settle his accounts with his predecessors. So in the case of the money theory. He tacitly adopts Steuart's theory when he says that the gold and silver existing in a country is partly utilized as coin; partly accumulated in the form of reserve funds for merchants in countries without banks, or of bank reserves in countries with a credit currency; partly serves as a hoard for the settling of international payments; partly is turned into articles of luxury. He passes over without remark the question as to the quantity of coin in circulation, treating money quite wrongly as a mere commodity.[1] His vulgarizer, the dull J. B.
- ↑ Note to the 2nd edition: This is not an exact statement. Adam Smith expresses the law correctly on many occasions. [See Capital, Humboldt edition, p. 62, ft-note 1, where writing seven years later, Marx makes the following qualification: "This statement applies only in so far as Adam Smith, ex officio, treats of money. Now and then, however, as in his criticism of the earlier systems of political economy, he takes the right
Büsch rendered Steuart's elegant English into Hamburg Platt and by trying to improve upon the original spoiled it as often as he could.
