It differs, again, from consumable goods inasmuch as although both circulate from hand to hand on the wheel, the consumable goods as such exist to be consumed and destroyed, whilst the money as such must not be destroyed or it will have failed in its object which is to lose as little of its weight as possible by consumption or wear and tear; indeed it is owing to their relative fixity, immutability, and permanence, that gold and silver have been chosen for the double purpose of a means of exchange and a standard of value. And above all, while the other consumable goods constitute the real wealth of individuals, money which can neither be eaten nor worn, nor otherwise made use of for either the sustenance, the preservation, or the comforts of life, is not real wealth at all.

And so with all these differences from, and resemblances to, both fixed capital and consumable goods, the question still recurs as to where definitely we are to place it. Being neither altogether outside the wheel, like the fixed capital, nor yet altogether on it and circulating around it like consumable goods (for its function as a standard of wealth places it as much outside the circulating wealth itself as a yard measure is outside the thing to be measured), I am afraid we shall have to put it in a separate compartment of its own. It is to be regarded rather as a necessary adjunct of the fixed capital of a nation than as any true addition to it; or if it is an addition, it is of a negative character rather than a positive, like the railroads and waterways which do not increase wealth by their purely productive powers, but only by their negative services in the saving of time necessary to get the goods into the hands of the consumers. But as money actually and in fact does quicken the movements of the wheel, this fact of its being a negative instead of a positive element in wealth production might be dismissed as a mere pedantry, were it not that it cannot be increased beyond a certain amount, without having a negative or even contrary effect.

And thus it is to be regarded in its essential nature rather as a necessary adjunct of wealth than as wealth itself, as the pebbles in the stomach of a fowl are a necessary adjunct to the digestion of its food, but not part of the food itself.

Strictly speaking, money, like the order of the amphibians in biology to which we have compared it, belongs as much to the province of Sociology as it does to that of Political Economy, and may be said to enter into the domain of wealth production from without as a beneficent accessory to smooth the running of its wheel, much as a piece of beneficent legislation might do, rather than to be an elemental essential of wealth itself. And the reason, I think, is this, that in the evolution both of Society and of Economics, the place and function of money would seem to be a provisional and transitional one, lying as it does between the age of barter, when it was not used, and the millennial state when it will be superseded and no longer wanted. In the earliest times, it is probable that the distribution of the ordinary necessaries of life was a matter of fixed custom or tribal arrangement, and was performed without the aid of any form of money at all, while what was afterwards to become money - shells, furs, curious stones, or what not - were ornaments of the person rather, conferring dignity, honour, and distinction, much as ribbons, orders, insignia, and titles do now; and only used as money for the settlement of inter-tribal obligations; and so belonged as much to the sphere of Politics and Sociology as to that of Political Economy. In the millennial society of the future, on the other hand, it is probable that there will be some more equitable standard for the distribution of honours and rewards of all kinds, material as well as moral, political, and social, than the amount of mere money or bank credits which men, or classes of men, have managed either like robbers to seize, like misers to hoard, or like exploiters to cunningly divert to themselves through political and legislative power or the mingled operations of religion and fear.

But in the present transitional stage of human development and evolution, Money in a negative way is as real and necessary an element in the production and increase of wealth as railways, roads, and waterways. In a negative way, I have said, inasmuch as its function, being still as much political and social as economical, is rather to regulate the distribution of wealth between individual and individual, than to create it; resembling in this the function of courts of law, which do not create the social and moral values of individuals, but regulate and redistribute them when these individuals fail to play the social game fairly. Indeed without money, wealth and its distinctions would become an endless bone of contention between the individual members of a Political State, and would be at the mercy of the most unjust, the most brutal, and the most disorderly elements of the population; much of the wealth of a society would decay or become useless while men were squabbling and fighting for its possession; and not only would the wealth of the nation decline in consequence, but its sense of justice, its code of morality, and its social standards and ideals as well; all of them the most delicate and highly cultivated flowers which civilization has reared from the wild stock of the brute aboriginal world, and which require the most assiduous care and attention if they are not to revert to their wild state again.

Summing up, then, we may say that if a nation stood alone by itself, or, which is the same thing, if the world is to be regarded as a single economic whole, gold and silver money are not to be counted in the national assets from which savings can be made and wealth increased, in the same sense in which the soil and mines, inventions and processes, and the industrial skill of the population can be counted; inasmuch as although they have our first prerequisite of all savings, namely relative permanency, they are wanting in our second, namely those powers of Nature which, as free gifts to man over and above the labour involved in the machinery of all kinds necessary to capture them and yoke them to his service, are the source of all increase of wealth. For all practical purposes, therefore, we may regard them as implicitly included with consumable goods in the fixed capital of the nation, as a kind of natural lubricant, as it were, secreted by that fixed capital for the oiling of its machinery, but in quantities strictly limited to the purpose; like the natural oil which the water-fowls secrete to facilitate their movements through the water.

In our next chapter we shall see that the same holds true, but to an even greater extent, of credits of all kinds - bank notes, bills of exchange, cheques, notes of hand, etc., - always premising that we are dealing either with a single nation isolated, or with the world as a single economic whole. In the normal case of a nation existing side by side with other nations, and in trade relations with them, the gold and silver which are the immediate desire of all hearts as the standard and measure of economic wealth the world over, and not merely its circulating medium, must be added to the fixed capital and the working population as part of the nation's assets, inasmuch as it can draw to that amount on the wealth of other nations at all times, and convert that wealth into an addition to its own either in the form of fixed capital or consumable goods at its discretion. And the same is true of all credits held against other nations and redeemable in silver or gold. In our next chapter we shall consider the function and mechanism of credits in detail.