Page:Garden Cities of To-morrow (1902).djvu/102

92 did not build the houses in any of the supposed cases. The coins were but the measure of value, and like a pair of scales and weights, may be used over and over again without any perceptible lessening of their worth. What built the houses was really labour, skill, enterprise, working up the free gifts of nature; and though each of the workers might have his reward weighed out to him in coins, the cost of all buildings and works in Garden City must be mainly determined by the skill and energy with which its labours are directed. Still, so long as gold and silver are recognised as the medium of exchange, it will be necessary to use them, and of great importance to use them skilfully—for the skill with which they are used, or their unnecessary use dispensed with, as in a banker's clearing house, will have a most important bearing upon the cost of the town, and upon the annual tax levied in the shape of interest on borrowed capital. Skill must be therefore directed to the object of so using coins that they may quickly effect their object of measuring one value, and be set to work to measure another—that they may be turned over as many times as possible in the year, in order that the amount of labour measured by each coin may be as large as possible, and thus the amount represented by interest on the coins borrowed, though paid at the normal or usual rate, shall bear as small a proportion as possible to the amount paid to labour. If this is done effectively, then a saving to the community in respect of interest as great as the more easily demonstrated saving in landlord's rent may probably be effected.

And now the reader is asked to observe how admirably, and, as it were, automatically, a well-organised migratory movement to land held in common lends itself