The liberty cap was first used as an emblem by the committee of safety organized at Philadelphia early in 1775. At a meeting on the 31st of August of that year, it was resolved by the committee that Owen Biddle provide a seal for the use of the board, about the size of a dollar, with a cap of liberty, with this motto: 'This is my right, and I will defend it.' Upon the first cent issued by the United States Mint for circulation, in 1793, the cap appears. This cap is the Phrygian cap, and all nations recognize it as the badge of liberty. When Spartacus rose at the head of his fellow slaves against their Roman masters to obtain liberty, his followers were distinguished by this cap. Though their effort was unsuccessful, the principle of liberty still exists, to be fought for until the last manacle is struck from the last slave. And mankind has recognized that early struggle for freedom by adopting the cap as one of the attributes of the goddess of freedom. The freaks of currency are singular. The early Greeks bartered with cattle; hence we derive _pecunia_ (money) from pecus (the flock). Cowry shells have bought slaves on the African coast, and wampum answered for money with the Indian, The Carthaginians, Frederick II. at the siege of Milan, Philip I. and John the Good, kings of France, used stamped leather, the latter inserting a silver nail in the centre. St. Louis, of France, issued the black coin made of billon. The Anglo-Saxons used rings, torques, and bracelets. Homer says the Greeks carried on their traffic with bars and spikes of brass. Salt is the money of Abyssinia, and codfish in Iceland. In Adam Smith's day, the Edinburgh workmen bought bread with nails, and drank from foaming tankards paid for with spikes. Marco Polo found mulberry-bark money in China, stamped with the sovereign's seal, which it was death to counterfeit, as was the case also with the Continental currency of our own country. The first families of Virginia, now fighting for the ideas of aristocracy and labor owned by capital, are the lineal and quite recent descendants of shiploads of women exported from the crowded capitals of Europe, with little regard to character or condition, and bought at so many pounds of tobacco per head. The cannon used by James II. in his desperate struggle for the throne, were melted up and coined into the famous gun money; and the bells of Paris which tolled over the horrors of the guillotine, in the bloody days of Robespierre, met a similar useful end. Charles I., with a Vandal hand, melted up the plate of the aristocracy and the almost inestimable relics of Oxford into siege pieces. In 1641, Massachusetts enacted that wheat should be received in payment of debts; and during the French Revolution, the convention, upon the motion of Jean Bon Saint Andre, discussed the propriety of making wheat the standard of value.