For us the century-circled oak 4. Up! up!-in nobler toil than ours We make of Nature's giant powers Lay rib to rib and beam to beam, 5. Where'er the keel of our good ship That ship must heed her master's beck, And seamen tread her reeling deck 6. Her oaken ribs the vulture-beak And know we well the painted shell 7 Ho!-strike away the bars and blocks, Look! how she moves adown the grooves, How lowly on the breast she loves 8. God bless her! wheresoe'er the breeze Aside the frozen Hebrides, Or sultry Hindostan ! Where'er, in mart or on the main, 9. Speed on the ship! But let her bear No groaning cargo of despair No Lethean drug for Eastern lands, But honest fruits of toiling hands And Nature's sun and showers. 10. Be hers the prairie's golden grain, The clustered fruits of sunny Spain, Her pathway on the open main ruddy, of a red colour. -J. G. Whittier. Hebrides, islands on W. of Scotland. Lethean, producing stupor, so called from the fabled river Lethe, whose waters had the power of producing entire forgetfulness. prairies, the vast plains of N. America. ORIGIN AND USE OF MONEY 1. When the division of labour has been once thoroughly established, it is but a very small part of a man's wants which the produce of his own labour can supply. He supplies the far greater part of them by exchanging that surplus part of the produce of his own labour which is over and above his own consumption, for such parts of the produce of other men's labour as he has occasion for. Every man thus lives by exchanging, or becomes in some measure a merchant, and society itself grows to be what is properly a commercial society. 2. But when the division of labour first began to take place, this power of exchanging must frequently have been very much clogged and embarrassed in its operations. One man, we shall suppose, has more of a certain commodity than he himself has occasion for, while another has less. The former, consequently, would be glad to dispose of, and the latter to purchase, a part of this superfluity. But if this latter should chance to have nothing that the former stands in need of, no exchange can be made between them. The butcher has more meat in his shop than he himself can consume, and the brewer and the baker would each of them be willing to purchase part of it. But they have nothing to offer in exchange except the different productions of their respective trades, and the butcher is already provided with all the bread and beer which he has immediate occasion for. No exchange can, in this case, be made between them. He cannot be their merchant, nor they his customers; and they are all of them thus less mutually serviceable to one another. 3. In order to avoid the inconveniency of such situations, every prudent man in every period of society, after the first establishment of the division of labour, must naturally have endeavoured to manage his affairs in such a manner as to have at all times by him, besides the peculiar produce of his own industry, a certain quantity of some article or other, such as he imagined few people would be likely to refuse in exchange for the produce of their industry, 4. Many different commodities, it is probable, were successively both thought of and employed for this purpose. In the rude ages of society, cattle are said to have been the common instruments of commerce; and, though they must have been a most inconvenient one, yet in old times we find things were frequently valued according to the number of cattle which had been given in exchange for them. 5. The armour of Diomede, says Homer, cost only nine oxen; but that of Glaucus cost an hundred oxen. Salt is said to be the common instrument of commerce and exchange in Abyssinia; a species of shells in some parts of the coast of India; dried cod at Newfoundland; tobacco in Virginia; sugar in some of the West India colonies; hides or dressed leather in some other countries; and there was, about a hundred years ago, a village in Scotland where it was not uncommon for a workman to carry nails instead of money to the baker's shop. 6. In all countries, however, men seem at last to have been determined by irresistible reasons to give the preference for this employment to metals above every other commodity. Metals can not only be kept with as little loss as any other commodity, scarce anything being less perishable than they are, but they can likewise, without any loss, be divided into any number of parts, as by fusion those parts can easily be re-united again; a quality which no other equally durable commodities possess, and which, more than any other quality, renders them fit to be the instruments of commerce and circulation. The man who wanted to buy salt, for example, and had nothing but cattle to give in exchange for it, must have been obliged to buy salt to the value of a whole ox or a whole sheep at a time. 7. He could seldom buy less than this, because what he was to give for it could seldom be divided without loss; and, if he had a mind to buy more, he must, for the same reasons, have been obliged to buy double or triple the quantity, the value, to wit, of two or three oxen, or of two or three sheep. If, on the contrary, instead of |