[105] Mr. MacLeod, in spite of his doctrinaire conceit about definitions, fails so utterly to grasp the most elementary economic relations that he tries to deduce the very origin of money from its crowning form, viz., that of a means of payment. He says among other things that since people do not always need each other’s services at the same time, and not to the same extent, “there would remain over a certain difference or amount of service due from the first to the second―debt.” The owner of this debt needs the services of a third person, who does not directly need those of the second, and “transfers to the third the debt due to him from the first. Evidence of debts changes so hands―currency.... When a person received an obligation expressed by metallic currency, he is able to command the services not only of the original debtor, but of the whole of the industrious community.” (MacLeod, “Theory and Practice of Banking,” etc., London, 1855, v. I., ch. I.) [106] Bailey, l. c., p. 3. “Money is the general commodity of contracts, or that in which the majority of bargains about property, to be completed at a future time, are made.” [107] Says Senior (in his Lectures, published by Comte Arrivabene, l. c., p. 117): “Since the value of everything changes within a certain period of time, people select as a means of payment an article whose value changes least and which retains longest a given average ability to buy things. Thus, money becomes the expression or representative of values.” On the contrary: just because gold, silver, etc., have become money, i. e., the embodiment of independently existing exchange value, they become the universal means of payment. When the consideration as to the stability of the value of money mentioned by Mr. Senior comes into play, i. e., in periods when money asserts itself as the universal means of payment through the force of circumstances, then is just the time when fluctuations in the value of money are discovered. Such was the time of Elizabeth in England, when Lord Burleigh and Sir Thomas Smith, in view of the manifest depreciation of the precious metals, put through an act of parliament which obliged the universities of Oxford and Cambridge to stipulate the payment of one-third of their ground rents in wheat and malt.