Page:Tales in Political Economy by Millicent Garrett Fawcett.djvu/73

 rather than remain hungry when he had a bag full of gold. Gradually, however, as the money became more evenly distributed, the relative prices of things settled down into correspondence with their real value. Thus in the old days of barter, a pair of oars, which represented one day's work of the carpenter, would exchange for twice as much plantain bread as a wooden bowl which only cost the carpenter half a day's work; the value of the pair of oars was, therefore, twice that of the wooden bowl. And now that money was in general use, the price of the oars was double that of the bowl. What the scale of prices actually should be was controlled by three things: 1st, by the amount of money in circulation; 2dly, by the quantity of things that were bought and sold for money; and 3dly, by the number of times commodities were bought and sold before they were used. It is evident that the amount of money in circulation must have an influence on general prices. Suppose that the same number of people are receiving wages, that the same quantity of commodities are bought and sold the same number of times,