The
quantity of it among a people constitutes their wealth (opulentia).
For price (pretium) is the public judgement about the value of a
thing, in relation to the proportionate abundance of what forms the
universal representative means in circulation for carrying on the
reciprocal interchange of the products of industry or labour.* The
precious metals, when they are not merely weighed but also stamped
or provided with a sign indicating how much they are worth, form legal
money, and are called coin.
*Hence where commerce is extensive neither gold nor copper is
specially used as money, but only as constituting wares; because there
is too little of the first and too much of the second for them to be
easily brought into circulation, so as at once to have the former in
such small pieces as are necessary in payment for particular goods and
not to have the latter in great quantity in case of the smallest
acquisitions. Hence silver- more or less alloyed with copper- is taken
as the proper material of money and the measure of the calculation
of all prices in the great commercial intercommunications of the
world; and the other metals- and still more non-metalic substances-
can only take its place in the case of a people of limited commerce.
According to Adam Smith: "Money has become, in all civilized
nations, the universal instrument of commerce, by the intervention
of which goods of all kinds are bought and sold or exchanged for one
another.
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