Principles of Political Economy

by Arthur Latham Perry

Commodities are the class of Valuables comprising material things, organic and inorganic, fitted by human efforts to satisfy human desires. Cattle were probably among the first things to become valuable, that is, salable; and it is certain, that they became very early in many quarters of the world a sort of Money or standard of comparison among other things exchangeable, and indeed they continue to be such in some quarters to this day. Near the middle of the sixth book of the Iliad occur these lines:—

"Then did the son of Saturn take away
The judging mind of Glaucus, when he gave
His arms of gold away for arms of brass
Worn by Tydides Diomed,—the worth
Of fivescore oxen for the worth of nine."

Gold and silver also became valuable in the ordinary way in very early times, and later became Money or a medium in exchanging other things; and much later other metals came into use as commodities and then too as money; for the Latin word for money, pecunia, derived from pecus, cattle, seems to imply some original equivalence in value between the bronze stamped with the image of cattle and the cattle themselves. Parcels of land subdued and improved by human hands were probably bought and sold in some portions of the world as early as anything was,—at any rate very early. Land-parcels are a commodity under the definition. Another passage from Homer, towards the end of the seventh book of the Iliad, displays some of the commodities in common use during the heroic age in Greece:—

"But the long-haired Greeks
Bought for themselves their wines; some gave their brass,
And others shining steel; some bought with hides,
And some with steers, and some with slaves, and thus
Prepared an ample banquet."

The earliest detailed record of a commercial transaction in commodities, is the purchase by Abraham of the field and cave in Hebron, more than 2000 years before Christ. It is narrated at length in Genesis xxiii. Long before this purchase, however, it is said of Abraham that he "went up out of Egypt very rich in cattle, in silver, and in gold." This formal sale to him in Hebron of the field and cave of Machpelah is in all its parts instructive to us, and full of signs of the drift of those times. It was "in the audience of the sons of Heth, before all that went in at the gate of his city, that the field and the cave were made sure unto him for a possession. And Abraham weighed unto Ephron the silver which he had named in the audience of the sons of Heth, four hundred shekels of silver, current money with the merchant." In the lack of written and recorded deeds to land-parcels, as we have them now, the sale of them was "made sure" before the faces of living men, who would tell the truth and pass on the word. The market-place in those days was "at the gate of the city," where the judges also used to hold their courts, the place most frequented of all, and sales were made "before all that went in" thither; "in the audience of the sons of Heth" was the silver weighed out, and the field made sure in exchange. Then there were "merchants" as a class; silver passed by weight rather than by tale, although it had already passed beyond a mere commodity and had become money, "current money with the merchant"; and even at this day the Bank of England takes in and pays out gold and silver by balance rather than by count, though they be in coined money: it is the more accurate method.

The author of the book of Job, believed to be of great antiquity, and certainly true to nature and to fact in its essential parts, knew very well the modes in which the ancient mines were wrought, and the worth of the commodities extracted:—

"Truly there is a vein for silver,
And a place for gold, which men refine.
Iron is obtained from earth,
And stone is melted into copper.
Man putteth an end to darkness;
He searcheth to the lowest depths
For the stone of darkness and the shadow of death.
From the place where they dwell they open a shaft;
Forgotten by the feet,
They hang down, they swing away from men.
The earth, out of which cometh bread,
Is torn up underneath, as it were by fire.
Her stones are the place of sapphires,
And she hath clods of gold for man.
The path thereto no bird knoweth,
And the vulture's eye hath not seen it;
The fierce wild beast hath not trodden it;
The lion hath not passed over it.
Man layeth his hand upon the rock;
He upturneth mountains from their roots;
He cleaveth out streams in the rocks,
And his eye seeth every precious thing;
He bindeth up the streams, that they trickle not,
And bringeth hidden things to light."

The prophet Ezekiel, who wrote in the sixth century before Christ, incidentally described in his chapter xxvii the commerce in commodities, that then centered in the city of Tyre on the eastern Mediterranean. "All the ships of the sea with their mariners were in thee to traffic in thy merchandise: many islands were at hand to thee for trade: with silver, iron, tin, and lead, they traded in thy fairs: they brought thee for payment horns of ivory and ebony-wood." Among the commodities besides these exchanged in that market, are mentioned by the prophet horses and mules and lambs and rams and goats, wine of Helbon and white wool, fine linen and embroidered work, and riding cloths and mantles of blue and chests of damask and thread, wheat and pastry and syrup and oil and balm, precious spices and cassia and sweet reed, and gold and carbuncles and corals and rubies. These old Phœnicians of Tyre colonized Carthage, and thus bore a vast trade in commodities to the West, going overland into the heart of Africa for dates and salt and gold-dust and slaves, and by sea through the Pillars of Hercules northward to the British Isles for the sake of the trade in tin.

The amount of transactions in commodities, the first class of Valuables, has been constantly increasing, under natural impulses which we shall have shortly to describe, from the dawn of authentic History down to the present moment; and figures are baffled in expressing to our minds the sum of these transactions even in a single country, still more their aggregate in the commercial world. The foreign trade of every country is almost exclusively in commodities, and is only a small fraction of its domestic trade in the same; and so, when we remember that the foreign trade of the United States, for example, under a commercial system designed and adapted to curtail such trade, amounted in 1889 to about $1,600,000,000, and the foreign trade by Great Britain the same year to about 4,000,000,000, we gain a glimpse, we touch as it were the hem of the garment, of the gigantic traffic of the world in commodities alone.

The Production of Commodities is the getting them ready to sell and the selling them.