[5] In 1658, it was ordered by the General Court of Massachusetts that no man should pay taxes “in lank cattle.”—Felt’s Massachusetts Currency.
[6] This incident is related by Burton, in his “Explorations of the Lake Regions of Central Africa” (1858-’59), as one within his knowledge of actual occurrence.
Chapter VI.
Gold, and How they Came to Use It.
Finally, time and circumstances helped the islanders to a solution of their difficulties. A man, walking in a ravine one day, picked up a small bright mass of shining metal. Although it had evidently lain in the sand, been washed by the water, exposed to the atmosphere, and rubbed against the rocks, nobody knows how long, it had a remarkable brightness and color; and the more it was rubbed, the brighter and more attractive it became. This little mass of metal, which afterward came to be designated as gold, the man carried home to his wife, who in turn was so much pleased with it that she hung it by a string about her neck as an ornament. Its attractiveness of course excited the desire of every other woman to have the same, and a further search in the ravine resulted in the discovery of other nuggets. Closer examination of the new metal also showed that it possessed many other remarkable qualities besides brightness. It was found it could easily be melted and cast, and also be readily molded without heat by hammering and pressing; and that when so cast, molded, and pressed, it persistently retained the shape and impression that were given it. Further, that it could be drawn into the finest of wire, hammered into the thinnest of plates and leaves, and be bent and twisted to almost any extent without breaking; that an admixture with it of the slightest impurity or alloy so immediately changed its color, that color became to a very high degree a test of its purity;[1] that fire, water, air, and almost all the agencies destructive to other things, had comparatively little or no effect upon it; that with the exception of size and weight, every piece, no matter how small, possessed all the attributes of every other larger piece; and that when any large piece was divided into a great number of smaller pieces, these last, in turn, could be reunited without loss or difficulty again into one whole. Of course, the discovery of all these remarkable qualities united in one substance not only greatly increased its utility, but at the same time greatly increased the desire of every body to have it. In place of being worn in a rough state as an ornament, it was converted into rings, bracelets, chains, pins, etc. It was found to be almost indispensable for a great number of mechanical and chemical purposes; and, finally, the charm for its possession and desire for its use proved so overpowering that to many it actually became almost an object of worship.
If a man was a Pagan, he felt that in no way could he so honor and symbolize the god he worshiped as to fashion in gold the image of that which he imagined; if he was a Christian, he chose gold for the fabrication of his symbolic vessels and ornaments, as, of all material things, the one which was most typical of purity, beauty, durability, and worth. If a great government or a people desired to commemorate the deeds of a hero or statesman, it impressed their effigies in medals of gold; if a maxim was enunciated which by general consent embodied the best rules of life, it was called golden; if a law or precept was thought worthy of being kept in ever-present remembrance before the people, it was emblazoned in letters of gold; while for speech, prophecy, or poetry, this same metal has ever been a never-failing source for the finest of comparisons and the most attractive of figurative illustrations. In short, from the time of its first discovery, among all nations, in all countries, with the ignorant and the learned, the savage and the civilized, the rich and the poor, the humble and the powerful, gold has always been, of all material things, the one which most men have desired most; the one for which, under most circumstances, they have been willing to exchange all other material possessions, and for the sake of acquiring which, even part with immaterial things of greater value—honor, creed, morality, health, and even life itself.
Gold so becoming an object of universal desire to the people on the island, and made exchangeable for all other things, it soon acquired spontaneously a universal purchasing power, and from that moment became Money.
This purchasing power was at first by no means fixed or constant. So long as there was but a small quantity of gold, its purchasing power was large. As the quantity extracted from the rocks or washed from the sands became greater, and the wants of the people became more and more satisfied, its purchasing power or value decreased; and if the supply had continued, and the demand had been limited to the wants of the island exclusively, its value in time would have undoubtedly been no greater than copper or iron, and possibly not so great. But, very curiously, an abundant supply did not continue. That which was obtained first and with little labor proved to be the result of the decay and washing of the rocks through long ages; and when the readily accessible or surface deposits became exhausted, as was soon the case, the conditions determining the supply of gold became altogether different. On the one hand, there was no lack of gold. Instead of being a very scarce metal, as was for a time supposed, it was found to be so widely disseminated that the chemists and metallurgists readily detected traces of gold in almost every extensive bed of clay and sand they examined.[2]
But, on the other hand, experience also proved that to collect any very considerable quantity of the metal required the expenditure not only of a vast amount of most disagreeable and exhausting labor, but also of a great quantity of other commodities. So that the people who, at the outset, abandoned their various occupations of raising wheat, making coats, building boats, baking bread, and constructing stone walls and chimneys, and betook themselves to digging gold, soon learned that, as a general rule, the results of a day’s labor thus employed purchased no more of useful or desirable commodities—meat, drink, clothes, etc.—than the results of a similar amount of labor exerted in the most ordinary occupations; and not a few even were ready to assert, as the result of their individual experience, that a man could do better for himself in the way of earning a living by following any and every other occupation rather than that of seeking for gold.[3] Accordingly, after trying it for a little while, the most skilled laborers left the gold regions and went back to their old occupations; and these, in turn, were followed by the unskilled laborers in such numbers, that had it not been for the encouragement growing out of the hope of suddenly enriching themselves through the chance discovery of a great nugget (as sometimes happened), the mines would have been entirely deserted. As it was, the supply of gold greatly fell off, and, the demand for it remaining about the same, the purchasing power of the stock on hand for other commodities gradually increased, until it came about that the result of an average day’s labor in digging gold was found to buy more than the result of an average day’s labor in other occupations. But as soon as this was observed, an additional supply of labor went back to gold-mining, and continued to follow it, until an equalization of results from effort in gold-digging and effort in other corresponding employments was again established, as before related. And this interchange of employments and equalization of results from labor went on, year by year, until at last the people, as it were by instinct, found out that a given quantity of gold represented more permanently a given amount of a certain grade or kind of human labor or effort than any other one substance. And the moment this fact became apparent, the people on the island for the first time also clearly perceived that gold, in addition to the universal exchanging quality or purchasing power which it had before naturally acquired, from the circumstance that every body from the time of its first discovery wanted it, had further acquired two other attributes, which fitted it, above all things else, to serve as money; namely, and first, that it had become a measure or standard of value, by which, as by a yard-stick, the comparative value of all other commodities might be measured or estimated; and, second, that its value or purchasing power was so constant and continuously inherent in itself, even under circumstances when the value of most other commodities would be destroyed, that the greatest security or guarantee which any person owning gold could possibly have of its remaining valuable to him for any length of time was, that the owner should simply keep possession of it.