[54] On the occasion of the last commercial crisis the ideal African money received loud praise from certain English quarters, after its seat was this time moved from the coast to the heart of Barbary. The freedom of the Berbers from commercial and industrial crises was ascribed to the ideal unit of measure of their bars. Would it not have been simpler to say that trade and industry are the _conditio sine qua non_ of commercial and industrial crises? [55] The Currency Question, The Gemini Letters, London, 1844, p. 260-272, passim. [56] John Gray: “The Social System. A Treatise on the Principle of Exchange, Edinburgh, 1831.” Compare with “Lectures on the Nature and Use of Money, Edinburgh, 1848,” by the same author. After the February revolution Gray sent a memorial to the provisional French government, in which he instructs the latter that France is not in need of an “organization of labour,” but of an “organization of exchange” of which the plan is fully worked out in his money system. Honest John did not suspect that sixteen years after the appearance of his “Social System” a patent for the same discovery would be taken out by the ingenious Proudhon. [57] Gray, “The Social System,” etc., p. 63: “Money should be merely a receipt, an evidence that the holder of it has either contributed certain value to the national stock of wealth or that he has acquired a right to the same value from some one who has contributed to it.―‘’“” [58] An estimated value being previously put upon produce, let it be lodged in a bank, and drawn out again, whenever it is required, merely stipulating, by common consent, that he who lodges any kind of property in the proposed National Bank, may take out of it an equal value of whatever it may contain, instead of being obliged to draw out the self-same thing that he put in.” L. c., p. 68. [59] L. c., p. 16. [60] Gray: “Lectures on Money, etc.,” p. 182. [61] L. c., p. 169. [62] “The business of every country ought to be conducted on a national capital.” John Gray, “The Social System,” etc., p. 171. [63] “The land to be transformed into national property.” L. c., p. 298. [64] See e. g. W. Thompson: “An Inquiry into the Distribution of Wealth, etc.,” London, 1827. Bray, “Labour’s Wrongs and Labour’s Remedy,” Leeds, 1839. [65] Alfred Darimont’s “De la Reforme des banques,” Paris, 1856, may be considered as a compendium of this melodramatic theory of money.