Everybody knows that for a certain quantity of gold a certain quantity of cotton may be obtained, and for a certain quantity of corn, a horse. The fact that the horse is obtainable by the corn does not convert the corn into money, neither does gold any more than the corn become money because the cotton is obtained thereby. The gold for the time is equal in value to the cotton, and so is the corn to the horse. Now, what is required of money is this: Suppose the gold, cotton, corn and the horse to be of equal value, a person possessing an amount of money representing the value of either of the four can, at his discretion, purchase whichever he may choose; since the money would equally represent the gold, cotton, corn and the horse. Anything that may be used for money that will not do the same thing for any variety of the products of labor, values being equal, is not money in any sense of that term. Incidentally in this connection, because it has an indirect bearing upon the question under consideration, I wish to call attention to a mistake that has been productive of more financial ills and consequent injustice to a large proportion of the people, who are the wealth producers, than any other single cause, and that is the fundamental error of making land, wealth, which it is no more entitled to be, scientifically, than gold is to be called money. Wealth is that which is produced. Land exists. All improvements made upon land are wealth; _but the land proper, never_. In this almost fatal mistake—almost fatal to the humanitarian interests of the so-called common people—which is fundamental in its nature, is found the _basis_ upon which rest the vast disparities in the distributions of wealth, and which gives to certain favored individuals the means of realizing vast fortunes without ever resorting to the production of wealth, or of even accumulating it by trafficking in the different kinds of wealth. There are numerous examples of this manner of becoming possessed of riches. People acquire title to lands which, by favorable location, come into great demand and consequently rise in value from _one dollar per acre to hundreds of thousands of dollars per acre_. By what principle of _equity_ and _right_ should _any_ person be entitled to such vast increases in capital invested in land, when it is entirely attributable to the movements of the community which produce it, and in no single particular to the individual? To be so entitled is for the individual to possess advantages over others to which no just communal government should for a moment consent—is to have the right to appropriate to self the results of labor which belong in common to all the people. Such results are against _all_ principles of equity and justice, and is one of the _greatest_, if not _the_ greatest error of the present, regarding the equities of property, and is the foundation and prophecy of all other kinds of monopoly.