Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 49.djvu/35

Rh less coherent bodies known as states and nations, the use of gold and silver as money has the more extensively been sustained by coinage—that is, the weight and fineness, and therefore to a degree the value, of different portions of these metals have been evidenced by the stamp of the administrative bodies of states and nations, and this use of gold and silver has been enhanced by their exquisite luster.

As commodities were exchanged in larger volume, metals of the greatest value were coined. The extensions of intercourse between races incident to the conquests of Philip and Alexander were marked by the coinage of gold. At the time of the decemvirs, the Romans passed from barter to the use of copper coins; as their commerce increased, the southern settlements along the sea made use of silver, and, finally, after gold bullion had long been the medium of exchange in Eastern commerce, Julius Cæsar opened the mints to gold. After the submersion of the Roman Empire the coinage of gold was not resumed until the florin was issued at Florence in 1252—the extensive commerce initiated by the Crusades demanding a more valuable medium than silver.

The different weights, sizes, and shapes of coins made by different nations, the different units of value by which they have been measured, and the different languages in which their values have been expressed, have caused much confusion, as different tribes, races, and nations have passed beyond restricted intercourse between their own members to commercial intercourse one with the other, or rather, as individuals of particular tribes, races, and nations have undertaken commercial intercourse with individuals of other tribes, races, and nations. Hence the money-changers of antiquity, the remote forerunners of bankers who arrange international exchanges to-day. With the combination and recombination of tribes and races under governments, whose administration has extended over considerable areas, the monetary systems have become correspondingly fewer—the imperial coinage of the German Empire supplanted seventy different coinage systems of the combined states—and coins of the different nations have the more nearly approached uniformity in shape, weight, size, and value.

But even the precious metals, although they satisfy the requirements for money better than any other commodities, do not meet those requirements in perfection.

In the first place, the amount of silver and gold in existence at any one time is never in the same proportion to the volume and value of the exchanges of that time as it is to the volume and value of exchanges at other times—that is, the volume of gold and silver does not expand and contract in exact accord with the expansion and contraction of commerce. Nor is it conceivable that