Now, the Government of the land can proclaim, if it pleases, that these tickets can represent permanent claims on the community. Instead of being destroyed, they can be used over and over again for an indefinite period--be made what is called legal currency. What the laws have done is to decree that gold, silver, copper, and paper shall represent our claims on a certain proportion of the nation’s wealth. When we take our products to market we exchange them for these claims. These claims we afterwards present to the butcher, baker, and tailor, and when we have got rid of them we have exhausted our claims on them. If we can get no further claims we become poor or destitute. The only means of getting fresh claims is to bring more wealth to market and exchange it for more claims, and according to the quantity and quality of that wealth, so are the claims we get greater or smaller. The greater our claims the richer we are, the smaller our claims the poorer we are. If we bring to market products that no one wants and people will not exchange part of their claims for our merchandise, then we know our labour has been in vain. In order to live, we must obtain these legal claims on the general wealth, and if we cannot obtain them we starve or become parasites. A distinction exists, and a most important distinction, between money and legal tender currency. Anything may be money. If I have no legal tender currency and only a gold watch and I am in great need of a dress suit and I offer the watch for the suit and the watch is taken, that watch is money. It is no one else’s concern if the tailor accepts the watch in exchange for his labour, his skill, and his cloth. He has liberty to exchange the dress suit, if he pleases, for some ancient ornament he desires to possess, instead of for legal coin or currency. But he knows that the ornament will satisfy only his desire, and will be no claim on any portion of the community’s wealth. The butcher will not accept it for meat. But it has performed the function of money nevertheless. The law has decreed, however, that there shall be a species of money, or currency, that shall have permanent value as a medium of exchange. It has decreed that all must accept this in exchange for wealth and in discharge of all legal obligations. With this object in view it has chosen gold to be the legal claim, and has set up gold to be what is called a standard of value. Treatises have been written on standards and on values. Both are highly controversial subjects, but these controversies must be ignored here.