Passing now to the third function of money, enumerated by Tolstoy, we see that he attributes to it a new contingent service which is not mentioned as such in any political economy. In modern civilised society, he says, all the governments are in extreme need for money, and always in insolvable debt[28]. Wherefore they issue monetary tokens in the different countries[29]. These tokens: legal tender, inconvertible paper, coin, bills, and other governmental fiats, are distributed among the people, in order that later they could be collected as direct, indirect, and land taxes[30]. The debts of the present monetary state grow from year to year in a terrifying progression. Even so grow the budgets[31]. A state which should not levy taxes, for a comparatively short time would go to bankruptcy. The taxes and imposts required from people may be paid in form of cattle, corn, furs, skins, and other natural products, but this “natural economy” never practices in a civilised state. Governments force people to pay those taxes usually in “hard” or “soft” cash, because this kind of money best suits the purposes of rewarding the military and civil officials, of maintaining the clergy, the courts, the construction of prisons, fortresses, cannon[32], and supporting those men who aid in the seizure of the money from the people[33]. So we have the third function of money as the third method of enslavement[34], by means of tribute and taxes[35]. In modern times, since the discovery of America and the development of trade and the influx of gold, which is accepted as the universal money standard, the monetary tribute becomes, with the enforcement of the political power, the chief instrument of the enslavement of men[36], and upon it all the economic relation of men are based[37]. II Discussing money, Tolstoy cannot separate the economic question from the political. To him it appears inevitable that money performes a social service equivalent to the instrument of extortion. He does not take into consideration those inumerable utilities which circulating medium renders to the community and particularly to the commercial world, facilitating the transfer as well as aggregation of capital. “Chremmatistics” teaches us that money is the most general form of capital, capital in the fluid state, so that it can be immediately turned to new enterprises and transfered for investment to distant places. On the other hand, capital in the form of money is the most convenient vehicle of production and distribution of wealth. Tolstoy, as a medieval canonist, regards capital and wealth to be shameful and criminal things. He absolutely repudiates the theory that in all production only three factors take part: land, capital and labor. His disconcerting controversy in these matters contains nothing fundamentally new in political economy, but it is an odd manner in which he couches the notion of money in relation to production.