Page:Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, A - Karl Marx.djvu/229

Rh established commerce, and sets bounds to it in every country, by enabling the poorer states to undersell the richer in all foreign markets." "Where coin is in greater plenty; as a greater quantity of it is required to represent the same quantity of goods; it can have no effect, either good or bad, taking a nation within itself; any more than it would make an alteration on a merchant's books, if, instead of the Arabian method of notation, which requires few characters, he should make use of the Roman, which requires a great many. Nay, the greater quantity of money, like the Roman characters, is rather inconvenient, and requires greater trouble both to keep and transport it." In order to prove anything, Hume should have shown that under a given system of notation the quantity of characters used does not depend on the magnitude of the numbers, but that on the contrary, the magnitude of the numbers depends on the quantity of the characters used. It is perfectly true that there is no advantage in estimating or "counting" values of commodities in depreciated gold and silver, and that is the reason why nations have always found it more convenient with the growth of the value of the commodities in circulation to count in silver in preference to copper, and in gold rather than in silver. In proportion as the nations became richer, they converted the less valuable metals into subsidiary coin and the more valuable ones into money. Furthermore, Hume forgets that in order to count values in gold and silver,