As the universal thirst for gold prompted nations and princes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the period of infancy of modern bourgeois society, to crusades beyond the sea in search of the golden grail,[116] the first interpreters of the modern world, the founders of the monetary system, of which the mercantile system is but a variation, proclaimed gold and silver, i. e. money, as the only thing that constitutes wealth. They were quite right when, from the point of view of the simple circulation of commodities, they declared that the mission of bourgeois society was to make money, i. e. to build up everlasting treasures which neither moth nor rust could eat. It is no argument with the monetary system to say that a ton of iron whose price is £3 constitutes a value of the same magnitude as £3 worth of gold. The point here is not the magnitude of the exchange value, but as to what constitutes its adequate form. If the monetary and mercantile systems single out international trade and the particular branches of national industry directly connected with that trade as the only true sources of wealth or money, it must be borne in mind, that in that period the greater part of national production was still carried on under forms of feudalism and was the source from which producers drew directly their means of subsistence. Products, as a rule, were not turned into commodities nor, therefore, into money; they did not enter into the general social interchange of matter; did not, therefore, appear as embodiments of universal abstract labor; and did not, in fact, constitute bourgeois wealth. Money as the end and object of circulation is exchange value or abstract wealth, but it is no material element of wealth and does not form the directing goal and impelling motive of production. True to the conditions as they prevailed in that primitive stage of bourgeois production, those unrecognized prophets held fast to the pure, tangible, and resplendent form of exchange value, to its form of a universal commodity as against all special commodities. The proper bourgeois economic sphere of that period was the sphere of the circulation of commodities. Hence, they judged the entire complex process of bourgeois production from the point of view of that elementary sphere and confounded money with capital. The unceasing war of modern economists against the monetary and mercantile system is mostly due to the fact that this system blabs out in brutally naive fashion, the secret of bourgeois production, viz. its subjection to the domination of exchange value. Ricardo, though wrong in the application he makes of it, remarks somewhere that even in times of famine, grain is imported not because the nation is starving, but because the grain dealer is making money. In its criticism of the monetary and mercantile system, political economy, by attacking that system as a mere illusion and as a false theory, fails to recognize in