But how is it possible that what at the beginning constituted only
goods or wares, at length became money? This has happened wherever a
sovereign as great and powerful consumer of a particular substance,
which he at first used merely for the adornment and decoration of
his servants and court, has enforced the tribute of his subjects in
this kind of material. Thus it may have been gold, or silver, or
copper, or a species of beautiful shells called cowries, or even a
sort of mat called makutes, as in Congo; or ingots of iron, as in
Senegal; or Negro slaves, as on the Guinea Coast. When the ruler of
the country demanded such things as imposts, those whose labour had to
be put in motion to procure them were also paid by means of them,
according to certain regulations of commerce then established, as in a
market or exchange. As it appears to me, it is only thus that a
particular species of goods came to be made a legal means of
carrying on the industrial labour of the subjects in their commerce
with each other, and thereby forming the medium of the national
wealth. And thus it practically became money.
The rational conception of money, under which the empirical
conception is embraced, is therefore that of a thing which, in the
course of the public permutation or exchange of possessions
(permutatio publica), determines the price of all the other things
that form products or goods- under which term even the sciences are
included, in so far as they are not taught gratis to others.
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