Some years since, Mdlle Zelie, a singer of the Theatre Lyrique at Paris, made a professional tour round the world, and gave a concert in the Society Islands.  In exchange for an air from Norma and a few other songs, she was to receive a third of the receipts.  When counted, her share was found to consist of three pigs, twenty-three turkeys, forty-four chickens, five thousand cocoa-nuts, besides considerable quantities of bananas, lemons, and oranges.  At the Halles in Paris, as the prima donna remarks in her lively letter, ... this amount of live stock and vegetables might have brought four thousand francs [L160], which would have been good remuneration for five songs.  In the Society Islands, however, pieces of money were very scarce; and as Mademoiselle could not consume any considerable portion of the receipts herself, it became necessary in the meantime to feed the pigs and poultry with the fruit,’[27] and so her receipts consumed one another.

This is an example of the inconvenience which the invention of money overcame.  In primitive communities it took the form of cowry-shells or tobacco or gunpowder or any commodity which was in universal request in the place.  All the seller wanted to do was to be able to obtain for his product a certain amount of stuff which he could rely on being able to exchange for other things that he wanted.  In the end the precious metals, with their strong appeal to human vanity, and their utility for adorning temples and so propitiating divine favour, ousted all other commodities which had been used for money; and they are now to a great extent ousted by pieces of paper, which still, however, represent claims to so much gold.

The discovery of a circulating medium enormously facilitated the progress of commerce, and it was not long before a class of people grew up who specialized in this particular form of business and became financiers and moneylenders.  Bankers and financiers were known in Rome and Athens, and we know that some machinery existed by which the monetary claims of one country on another could be settled by something that fulfilled the functions of the modern bill of exchange.  The actual provision of metallic currency has from the earliest times been almost entirely under the control of the government which took into its own hands, as an essential part of the police protection which it gives to the people, the coining of currency, stamping the coin in such a way that anybody who took one might know that he was getting a certain weight of a precious metal.  But the money-dealing business very soon developed the machinery of credit by which anybody who had an enterprise or a venture out of which he expected to make an attractive profit could, if he had sufficient property to pledge, provide himself with the means to finance it between the day that he started on his operations and the day when he brought home his profits:  and this business also became international, though not, perhaps, as rapidly as commerce had overstepped the boundaries between one people and another.