his Schönaich a Homer and himself a Pietro Aretino to the _terror principum and lux mundi_―has with great pomp raised this not altogether innocent oversight of Adam Smith to a dogma.[132] It must be said, however, that his hostile attitude to the illusions of the mercantile system prevented Adam Smith from taking an objective view of the phenomena of metallic circulation, while his views on credit money are original and deep. As in the eighteenth century petrification theories there is always felt the presence of an undercurrent which springs from either a critical or apologetic attitude toward the biblical tradition of the flood, so there is concealed behind all the money theories of the eighteenth century a secret struggle with the monetary system, the ghost which had stood guard over the cradle of bourgeois economy and continued to throw its shadow over legislation. In the nineteenth century, inquiries into the nature of money were not prompted directly by phenomena of metallic circulation, but rather by those of bank-note circulation. The former was touched upon only in order to discover the laws governing the latter. The suspension of specie payments by the Bank of England in 1797, the rise of prices of many commodities which followed it, the fall of the mint price of gold below its market price, the depreciation of bank-notes, especially since 1809, furnished the direct practical occasion for a party struggle in parliament and a theoretical tournament outside of it, both conducted with like passion. The historical background for the controversy was furnished by the history of paper money during the eighteenth century: the fiasco of Law’s bank; the depreciation of the provincial bank-notes of the English Colonies in North America from the beginning to the middle of the eighteenth century which went hand in hand with the increase in the number of tokens of value; further, the Continental bills issued as legal tender by the American government during the War of Independence; and finally, the experiment with the French _assignats_ carried out on a still larger scale. Most of the English writers of that period confound the circulation of bank-notes, which is governed by quite different laws, with the circulation of tokens of value or government legal tender paper money; and while they claim to explain the phenomena of this legal tender circulation by the laws of metallic circulation, they proceed, as a matter of fact, just the opposite way, viz., deducting laws for the latter from phenomena observed in connection with the former. We omit all the numerous writers of the period of 1800-1809 and turn directly to RICARDO, both because he embodies the views of his predecessors, which he formulates with greater precision, and because the shape he gave to the theory of money governs English bank legislation until this moment. Ricardo, like his predecessors, confounds the circulation of bank-notes, or credit