prices, between 1492 and 1560, the yearly decline in their prices was only one-half of one per cent. per annum. Their great pliability of form has, too, very important advantages for our purpose: first, that they can be divided very accurately into very small parts, and that the volume of every part corresponds exactly to the value of the part;(731) and secondly, that they take an impression at very little cost, an impression which is an authoritative and trustworthy expression of their weight and quality, thus saving the commercial public the perilous trouble of weighing and testing them every time they are used.(732)(733)(734) This duty the state, as a rule, assumes. (Coinage.) When its authority, however, is not recognized, as is generally the case in international trade, gold and silver bars are even now used, and have, therefore, to be weighed and tested.(735)(736) Section CXXI. Value In Use And Value In Exchange Of Money. The original value in use of the precious metals, to satisfy certain wants of luxury in the most aesthetic and the most substantial manner, continues still; but with the advance of civilization, the employment of gold and silver for this purpose has fallen farther and farther behind the more recent employment of these metals as the best material for money. And since now the services rendered by money may be divided into two classes: storing up or preservation, and the transmission (division, concentration) of values,(737) the former always plays a greater part in the earlier states of the development of trade by money; and the latter plays the larger part in the later stages of the same development. We may best compare money to the other machines or instruments of commerce.(738) The person who, in times when there is a dearth of goods, and especially of capital, complains of a want of money, commits the same error as if he ascribed a scarcity or absence of grain, when it exists, to a too small number of wagons to carry it, or to the narrowness of country highways. The inference may, indeed, be sometimes well-founded, but certainly only by way of exception; and yet it is generally the first which politico-economical quacks think of in practice.(739) Like all tools or instruments, money constitutes a part of an individual’s or a nation’s, or of the world’s capital. Considered from the point of view of private business or economy, money is circulating capital, but from the point of view of the world’s economy, it is fixed capital.(740) Section CXXII. Value In Exchange Of Money.