It is generally said, that it is the steadiness of their value that constituted one chief reason for the selection of gold and silver for the purposes of money. This is undoubtedly true; but it is also true (and we do not remember to have heard this previously remarked) that the use of the precious metals for money has tended to preserve and perpetuate that steadiness of value. Had gold and silver remained as simple articles of merchandise, they would probably have suffered considerable fluctuations in their value from the caprice of fashion and the altered taste of society. In themselves, they were chiefly articles of luxury; the employment of them for money made them objects of indispensable utility. Money there must be. Yet mark how its introduction tends to destroy equality, to favour accumulation, to raise the hill and sink the valley. If men bartered article against article, they would generally barter in order to consume. But when one of them barters for gold, he can lay it by; he can postpone at his pleasure the period of consumption; he can postpone it for the benefit of his issue. The piece of gold was bought originally with the sweat of his brow; who shall say that a year, ten years, fifty years hence, he may not traffic it again for the sweat of the brow? The pieces of gold accumulate, his children possess them, and now a generation appears on the face of the earth who have not toiled, who do not toil all their lives, who are sustained in virtue of the labours of their ancestor. Their fathers saved, and they enjoy; or they employ a part of the accumulation in the purchase of the labour of others, by which means their riches still further increase. The pyramid rises. But the descendants of those fathers who had consumed the product of their labour, they bring no postponed claim into the market. These are they who must sell their labour. They must work for the children of those who had saved. Our pyramid broadens at the base. This perpetual value given to money has enabled the man of one generation to tax all ensuing generations with the support of his offspring. Hence much good; for hence the leisure that permits the cultivation of the mind, that fosters art, and refinement, and reflection: we have to notice here only how inevitably it builds the pyramid.