Hence bank notes and assignations are not
to be regarded as money, although they may take its place by way of
representing it for a time; because it costs almost no labour to
prepare them, and their value is based merely upon the opinion
prevailing as to the further continuance of the previous possibility
of changing them into ready money. But on its being in any way found
out that there is not ready money in sufficient quantity for easy
and safe conversion of such notes or assignations, the opinion gives
way, and a fall in their value becomes inevitable. Thus the industrial
labour of those who work the gold and silver mines in Peru and Mexico-
especially on account of the frequent failures in the application of
fruitless efforts to discover new veins of these precious metals- is
probably even greater than what is expended in the manufacture of
goods in Europe. Hence such mining labour, as unrewarded in the
circumstances, would be abandoned of itself, and the countries
mentioned would in consequence soon sink into poverty, did not the
industry of Europe, stimulated in turn by these very metals,
proportionally expand at the same time so as constantly to keep up the
zeal of the miners in their work by the articles of luxury thereby
offered to them. It is thus that the concurrence of industry with
industry, and of labour with labour, is always maintained.
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