The liberty cap was first used as an emblem by the committee of safety organized at Philadelphia early in 1775. At a meeting on the 31st of August of that year, it was resolved by the committee that Owen Biddle provide a seal for the use of the board, about the size of a dollar, with a cap of liberty, with this motto: 'This is my right, and I will defend it.' Upon the first cent issued by the United States Mint for circulation, in 1793, the cap appears. This cap is the Phrygian cap, and all nations recognize it as the badge of liberty. When Spartacus rose at the head of his fellow slaves against their Roman masters to obtain liberty, his followers were distinguished by this cap. Though their effort was unsuccessful, the principle of liberty still exists, to be fought for until the last manacle is struck from the last slave. And mankind has recognized that early struggle for freedom by adopting the cap as one of the attributes of the goddess of freedom.
The freaks of currency are singular. The early Greeks bartered with cattle; hence we derive pecunia (money) from pecus (the flock). Cowry shells have bought slaves on the African coast, and wampum answered for money with the Indian, The Carthaginians, Frederick II. at the siege of Milan, Philip I. and John the Good, kings of France, used stamped leather, the latter inserting a silver nail in the centre. St. Louis, of France, issued the black coin made of billon. The Anglo-Saxons used rings, torques, and bracelets. Homer says the Greeks carried on their traffic with bars and spikes of brass. Salt is the money of Abyssinia, and codfish in Iceland. In Adam Smith's day, the Edinburgh workmen bought bread with nails, and drank from foaming tankards paid for with spikes. Marco Polo found mulberry-bark money in China, stamped with the sovereign's seal, which it was death to counterfeit, as was the case also with the Continental currency of our own country. The first families of Virginia, now fighting for the ideas of aristocracy and labor owned by capital, are the lineal and quite recent descendants of shiploads of women exported from the crowded capitals of Europe, with little regard to character or condition, and bought at so many pounds of tobacco per head. The cannon used by James II. in his desperate struggle for the throne, were melted up and coined into the famous gun money; and the bells of Paris which tolled over the horrors of the guillotine, in the bloody days of Robespierre, met a similar useful end. Charles I., with a Vandal hand, melted up the plate of the aristocracy and the almost inestimable relics of Oxford into siege pieces. In 1641, Massachusetts enacted that wheat should be received in payment of debts; and during the French Revolution, the convention, upon the motion of Jean Bon Saint André, discussed the propriety of making wheat the standard of value.
From coins to wealth is but a step. The ancients surpassed the moderns in splendid wealth and lavish extravagance. Seneca, writing superb treatises in favor of poverty, was worth nearly five millions of dollars. Lentulus, the astrologer, made his black arts yield him over three millions. The delighted heirs of Tiberius found nearly thirty-six millions in his coffers, and in less than a year Caligula spent the whole of it. Milo's debts were Titanic, amounting to six millions. Cæsar had a list of creditors whose name was legion, before he obtained any public office; but he was soon enabled to present Curio with six hundred thousand dollars, Lucius Paulus with four hundred thousand, and Servilia, the mother of Brutus, with a trifle of a pearl worth over thirty thousand. Mark Antony's house was sold to Messala for over half a million, and Scaurus's villa was burned at a loss of over twelve millions. Otho spent over fourteen millions in finishing the wing of a palace commenced by Nero. One of Caligula's dinners cost a million dollars; and one of Heliogabalus's breakfasts, twenty-seven thousand dollars, Œsopus, the actor, swallowed a pearl worth eleven thousand dollars, and Apicius, the gourmand, ate over seventy-seven millions during his worthless life, and then committed suicide, because he was reduced one day to only a hundred thousand dollars in his purse.
I hold in my hand a huge iron token which Ptolemy struck in commemoration of his conquest of Egypt, and by its side the new two-cent piece of the United States, fresh and sparkling from the Mint at Philadelphia. The one antiquated, rude, corroded, and begrimed in its long conflict with time, and the other bright and vivid, its field and exergue unmarred, its emblems and legends clear and sharp. The coin of Ptolemy has a history. The obverse gives us undoubtedly the head of Jupiter, the cloud bearer, rugged, massive, stern, iron featured, taurine neck, hair in great serpentine coils and shocks; the reverse, a magnificent spread eagle, and the inscription in Greek, Basileus Ptolemaion. Ptolemy, flushed with the victory he had won for Alexander, issued it over two thousand years ago. After subserving the purposes of Athenian barter, some swarthy Egyptian obtained it; but our friend the Egyptian, in time, was gathered to his fathers. He was embalmed, and slept in the shadow of the Pyramid, where his royal predecessors were sleeping, and by the side of the eternal Sphynx, whose riddle he could not read in life. Perhaps death unsealed the mystery of those stony lips to him. The token was placed in the mummy case upon the Egyptian's lips, perhaps as Charon's toll. But, in that event, evidently our friend the Egyptian never crossed over the black river of Death, but is still wandering—a miserable shade—along its banks, seeking rest, and finding none. Token and Egyptian remained in their tomb while Thebes flourished and decayed, Tyre and Sidon crumbled into ruins, Rome, mistress of the world, cowered beneath the scourge of Goth and Vandal and Hun, and the earth was eclipsed in the night of the ages. Still the Pyramids towered toward heaven, the Sphynx gazed on with calm, earnest eyes, Memnon made music of welcome to the sun, and our token sealed the shrivelled silent lips of the Egyptian. The world emerged from its night. Dante and Aquinas, Copernicus and Galileo, Luther and Melanchthon, Gutenberg and Faust, Kant and Schlegel, Bacon, Leibnitz and Newton, Watt and Morse, tore away the seals before our token saw the light. It came forth into a new world by the hand of a missionary, preaching a religion founded three hundred years after it closed the lips of the Egyptian. The heathen god was upon its field, but the Christian religion had set aside the old mythology of which it was a representative. I turn from this relic of the past to the coin of the present, and upon the latter I find the acknowledgment of that religion, and of dependence upon its immutable Author: 'In God we trust;' and from this legend I augur deliverance from the troubles that beset us, the vindication of outraged laws, the Union of dissevered fragments, the return of peace to our distracted land, the integrity of the Republic.
MIRACLES.
People refuse to believe in miracles because they esteem, them incredible: how, then, do they believe in existence—in the being of anything? Is it credible—to human reason, I mean—that anything should be without a cause? Nothing, so far as we can judge, ever comes to be without an efficient cause—something that goes before, with power to bring that which comes after.
But existence is an indisputable fact: we must believe it, whether we can or not.
Oh yes, one may say, but there is an infinite Being from all eternity, and He has produced all other forms of existence.
Very well; but if that be so, do not let us trouble ourselves about what are called miracles. They come very easily after the creation of light—the creation of sun and moon and stars; or even of nebulous matter, so constituted that by its revolution in space it may generate these wondrous orbs.