The Origin, Tendencies and Principles of Government / A review of the rise and fall of nations from early historic time to the present; with special considerations regarding the future of the United States as the representative government of the world and the form of administration which will secure this consummation. Also, papers on human equality, as represented by labor and its representative, money; and the meaning and significance of life from a scientific standpoint, with its prophecies for the great future.

by Victoria C. Woodhull

PAPERS ON FINANCE AND COMMERCE.

NO. IX.

There are several propositions which should always remain in all considerations about money, so that the mind may not be led from its true sphere, and so that it may not be invested with peculiarities and characteristics that never did nor never can belong to money:

First and most important—most important because it is the determining point which gives all that follows tangibility—is, that money, in its primary uses, is a means and not an end. It is a means, because it was invented to assist the people in performing something that could be performed without, but not so well without it. And this is the sole use of money. Because this has been lost sight of and it has been invested with other functions, it has been possible for it to be converted to uses which at times, in culminating, have almost turned the world topsy-turvy.

Second. Money is the medium of exchanging commodities, and when diverted from its legitimate use and is made an end, results will ever follow which must be detrimental to the general interests involved.

Third. All the material value money possesses is so possessed because of the relation it bears to commodities, that relation being representative of or standing for.

Fourth. While money is the medium of exchanges, and while it is in use representative of valuable materials, it is in its last analysis the objective of that department of life of which labor is the subjective, and, therefore, when scientifically viewed, it resolves itself into a principal which is one of those upon which society must be built when a perfect foundation is formulated.

In providing a currency, therefore, to meet the uses which are demanded of it, its scientific feature, as a principle, should be the point of departure, and should be the only guide until it is attained. Labor being the basis of production, is the positive power which reaches forth and expends itself, where money, the other pole of the social battery, is reached; this reaction upon labor completes the circuit, and here is the process which is continually going on: A certain amount of labor—a positive power—produces a certain amount of money or negative result The interference with this natural process by extraneous means, through which undue quantities of negative forces are accumulated, is that process which robs labor of its natural and, therefore, just results.

The labor which the people of this country are capable of performing, then, is the real basis upon which money should be formulated, and, as in practice, the results generally are annual in their return, this basis should be measured by all they can produce annually. It follows that the basis upon which money should be uttered is this annual capacity of labor, and there should be sufficient uttered to completely measure this capacity, between which two, when once established, there would be an equilibrium produced, which would only require to be permanently regulated and maintained to insure a perfect harmony in the material interests of society.

For example, let it be supposed that the extremest legitimate amount of currency that would be warranted under the previous rule is one billion of dollars; and that this amount is all that the uses of money require when there is the largest amount of business being transacted. It must be remembered that this is not a redeemable currency, but that it is money; that it is the representative of the wealth of the nation, and that the government, as the head of the nation, has uttered it, upon the soundest and best basis of value any money could possibly have—the productive capacity of the country. In this money system there could be no such thing as the failure of banks to redeem their issues; nor of any loss to be sustained by the individual because of the mismanagement of any board of directors; and what is more than all the rest, in the present systems of society, its value would be sustained by the collective accumulated wealth of the whole country, and it could by no possibility depreciate in value so long as the value of the country was not exceeded by the amount of the issue.