shillings. In the world market, however, where national boundaries disappear, these national characteristics of the measure of money also disappear and give place to the general measures of weight of metals.
The price of a commodity or the quantity of gold into which it is ideally transformed, is, therefore, now expressed in the names of coins of the gold standard. Thus, instead of saying: a quarter of wheat is worth an ounce of gold, it is said in England to be worth 3 £ 17s. 10½d. All prices are thus expressed in the same denominations. The peculiar form which commodities lend to their exchange values is transformed into a money-denomination by which commodities tell each other how much they are worth. Money in its turn becomes money of account.[1]
We transform commodities into money of account, in our mind, on paper, in conversation, whenever it is
a question of expressing any kind of wealth in terms of exchange value.[2] For that transformation we need the gold substance, but only in imagination. In order to estimate the value of a thousand bales of cotton in a
- ↑ "Ἀνάχαρσις πυνθανομένου τινὸς, πρὸς τί οἱ Ἕλληνες χρῶνται τῷ ἀργυρίῳ εἶπεν πρὸς τὸ ἀριθμεῖν." (Athen. Deipn. l. IV. 49. v. 2, ed. Schweighäuser, 1802.) (When Anacharsis was asked for what purpose the Greeks used money, he replied, "For reckoning.")
- ↑ G. Garnier, one of the early French translators of Adam Smith, conceived the queer notion of fixing a proportion between the use of money of account and that of actual money. His proportion is 10 to 1. (G. Garnier, "Histoire de la Monnaie depuis les temps de la plus haute antiquité," etc., t. l, p. 78.)
