F. What do you mean?  I was just thinking of it when you heard me grumbling against money!  I was lamenting that my countrymen have not the courage to study what it is so important that they should know.

B. And yet the consequences are frightful.

F. The consequences!  As yet I have only mentioned one.  I might have told you of others still more fatal.

B. Yon make my hair stand on end!  What other evils can have been caused to mankind by this confusion between money and wealth?

F. It would take me a long time to enumerate them.  This doctrine is one of a very numerous family.  The eldest, whose acquaintance we have just made, is called the prohibitive system; the next, the colonial system; the third, hatred of capital; the Benjamin, paper money.

B. What! does paper money proceed from the same error?

F. Yes, directly.  When legislators, after having ruined men by war and taxes, persevere in their idea, they say to themselves, “If the people suffer, it is because there is not money enough.  We must make some.”  And as it is not easy to multiply the precious metals, especially when the pretended resources of prohibition have been exhausted, they add, “We will make fictitious money, nothing is more easy, and then every citizen will have his pocket-book full of it, and they will all be rich.”

B. In fact, this proceeding is more expeditious than the other, and then it does not lead to foreign war.

F. No, but it leads to civil war.

B. You are a grumbler.  Make haste and dive to the bottom of the question.  I am quite impatient, for the first time, to know if money (or its sign) is wealth.

F. You will grant that men do not satisfy any of their wants immediately with crown pieces.  If they are hungry, they want bread; if naked, clothing; if they are ill, they must have remedies; if they are cold, they want shelter and fuel; if they would learn, they must have books; if they would travel, they must have conveyances—­and so on.  The riches of a country consist in the abundance and proper distribution of all these things.  Hence you may perceive and rejoice at the falseness of this gloomy maxim of Bacon’s, “What one people gains, another necessarily loses:”  a maxim expressed in a still more discouraging manner by Montaigne, in these words:  “The profit of one is the loss of another.” When Shem, Ham, and Japhet divided amongst themselves the vast solitudes of this earth, they surely might each of them build, drain, sow, reap, and obtain improved lodging, food and clothing, and better instruction, perfect and enrich themselves—­in short, increase their enjoyments, without causing a necessary diminution in the corresponding enjoyments of their brothers.  It is the same with two nations.