rights of property exist in a country where such a monetary system coexists with private ownership of the soil, is a monstrous perversion of language. It is not the rights of property, but the wrongs of robbery, that these land and money laws tend to conservate. The prime necessity of man is to live: he cannot live without corn, unless in the lowest condition of the savage; but he may not only live, but live in comfort, without gold or silver. They are not the “staffs of life,” however in our ignorance we may bow the knee to them as to graven images. We invest them with supreme power, as superstition invests its idols. The ancient fabulist who sketched the character of _Midas_ seems to have written, by anticipation, a satire on modern credulity. _Midas_ enjoyed the fatal gift of turning all he touched into gold; his food was transmuted into the precious metal, and starvation taught him that corn was the true standard of all that was physically valuable. _Midas_ was the prototype of modern bullionists and moneymongers. The Bank of England can now pave its floors with gold; but what does it avail to the people? And yet was it not the industry of the people that raised the ore from the mines, and brought it hither by the sale or exchange of their labour, sustained by corn, the produce of labour in another form? What was the _intrinsic_ value of gold to _Midas_? We must not confound the _qualities_ of a mineral with its _properties_. Undoubtedly, the precious metals possess durability, sameness, great value in small bulk, portability, resistance to wear and tear, in a greater degree than any other substances; but these qualities _per se_ do not constitute them _money_,--they do no more than recommend them to mercantile nations as the best instruments of their kind out of which money can be manufactured; it is the act of the legislature, and that alone, which gives them the character and force of a _legal tender_, without which they would not form part of the currency of a nation. The legislature could confer the same power on any other material, even the most worthless, as Lycurgus did on iron, deprived of its malleability; and yet Sparta flourished with that circulating medium; nay, more, Sparta fell into ruin when the precious metals superseded the worthless iron, which its rulers were compelled to revive before the Republic was restored to prosperity. Some Eastern nations have used _cowries_ (small shells) as money; and the Russians, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, employed the skins of squirrels and martens. We ourselves use paper, and have used it without the condition of convertibility. In fact, if gold and silver had never been deposited in the bowels of the earth, or had been suffered to remain there, the wealth of nations would not have been deteriorated one farthing. They are the _signs_ of the thing signified, made such by Act of Parliament; they will neither feed us, nor clothe us, nor