in civilised human life, as complicated, indeed, for its purposes,
but as natural a growth as the bones in a man's wrist, and I do not
see how one can imagine anything at all worthy of being called a
civilisation without it. It is the water of the body social, it
distributes and receives, and renders growth and assimilation and
movement and recovery possible. It is the reconciliation of human
interdependence with liberty. What other device will give a man so
great a freedom with so strong an inducement to effort? The economic
history of the world, where it is not the history of the theory of
property, is very largely the record of the abuse, not so much of
money as of credit devices to supplement money, to amplify the scope
of this most precious invention; and no device of labour credits
[Footnote: Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, Ch. IX.] or free
demand of commodities from a central store [Footnote: More's Utopia
and Cabet's Icaria.] or the like has ever been suggested that does
not give ten thousand times more scope for that inherent moral dross
in man that must be reckoned with in any sane Utopia we may design
and plan.... Heaven knows where progress may not end, but at any
rate this developing State, into which we two men have fallen, this
Twentieth Century Utopia, has still not passed beyond money and the
use of coins.


Section 2

Now if this Utopian world is to be in some degree parallel to
contemporary thought, it must have been concerned, it may be still
concerned, with many unsettled problems of currency, and with the
problems that centre about a standard of value. Gold is perhaps of
all material substances the best adapted to the monetary purpose,