A Short History of Money

Money is undoubtedly the most popular of all ancient conveniences. Whether we consider it to be the root of all evil, or the source of all that is jolly and good, there's no denying the advantages that money has over earlier systems of swap and barter. Anyone can readily imagine the difficulties that might arise in trying to get a cab driver to make change for an ox – to say nothing of having to compute a tip in terms of broccoli and rhubarb.

Applied to modern urban living, such a system would prove both unwieldy and absurd. But no more absurd, perhaps, than some of the peculiar forms of money that men have been known to hoard and fret about: shells, feathers, beads, stones, elephant tails, whales' teeth, beetles' legs, iron bars, and bits of tufted string made from the fur of a fruit-eating bat.

Our own money seems to be somewhat more sensibly based, and has its origins in such age-old objects of desire as gold and silver and girls and cows. The words "capital" and "chattel" are derived from the same word as "cattle." Our "pecuniary" interests were once vested in pecus, the Latin term for cows. Today's "fee" stems from the Old Norse fe, meaning cattle, and our modern coins have "heads" and "tails."

The Homeric Greeks, for example, computed prices in terms of the ox standard, and to all intents and purposes oxen were considered money. As prizes for a wrestling match, Achilles offered the winner "a large tripod to stand on the fire, which the spectators valued at twelve oxen. For the loser, he brought out a woman well skilled in women's work, valued at four oxen."

"Hard was the struggle for that fine tripod," Homer reports in the Iliad, leaving posterity to infer that the woman was no bargain, even at four oxen. And no wonder. Shopping around in the Odyssey, we learn that twenty oxen was the going price for a really first-class slave girl, for such was the price Laertes paid for Euryclea, "when she was in her first youth."

While the early Greeks computed the price of slave girls in terms of cattle currency, the ancient Irish figured the price of cattle, chariots and everything else in terms of slave girls, or kumals. According to the Tain, the oldest epic poem in Western literature, the Brown Bull of Cuailnge was purchased for a chariot "worth three times seven bondsmaids." Included in the Irish King of Leinster's tax to Rome in 106 a.d. were 150 kumals, 150 cows, 150 swine and the king's daughter – which not only reduced the hapless monarch's capital assets, but left him with one less dependent to claim for the year 107.

Though gold and silver ornaments were often used as money, the kumal was so popular a currency that she was considered both legal and tender as late as the Middle Ages. Easily the liveliest loot of all time, the kumal was valued at three cows, with sheep, heifers and bags of grain serving as small change.

Grain was also a common currency in the agrarian economy of ancient Egypt. Taxes were paid in cereals, and granaries served as banks, on which the privileged and the wealthy could draw checks against their grain deposits. Gold was mined mainly for export, and was measured in "grains" that corresponded to the weight of a grain of wheat, just as it was later measured in "carats" to the weight of a carat seed.

In similar manner, the Babylonian shekel was 180 grains of barley, and offered a uniform standard by which to weigh a lump of silver in 3000 b.c., the earlier Babylonians issued silver ingots stamped with the images of gods, who supposedly guaranteed the weight and purity of the metal. Gold and silver were stored in temples, where they would receive divine protection, and in Judea, Greece and Rome coins were minted in temples. The words "money" and "mint" are but borrowings from the Latin Moneta, "a surname of Juno, in whose temple at Rome money was coined."

No one seems to be certain why Juno's temple was chosen to serve as the Roman mint, but a theory might be based on the fact that she was the protectress of cattle and women – both chattels and tokens of wealth. In Greece and early Rome, upper-class wives and consorts vied for the honor of posing for the goddesses depicted on coins, but the first woman to appear as herself was Cleopatra. Judging from her profile on the silver tetradrachma, the Siren of the Nile would have made a dubious booby-prize for a Greek wrestling (continued on page 122) Money (continued from page 97)match. Alexander, the first male monarch to be immortalized on money, looks just Great, however, despite the fact that he had been dead for almost a year when the coin was minted.

Ptolemy I of Egypt was the first living ruler to put his own face on a coin, but the despot with the greatest affection for his own portrait was Nero, who used Roman coins as though they were publicity photos. On one series we find Nero the Warrior. Another hails Nero the lyre-strumming Singer and Actor. On still another, Nero the speed-demon Charioteer appears with his hair crimped in the style of a hot-shot Circus driver. Then came Nero the Man of Peace, followed by Nero the Ruler Who Rebuilt Rome after the famous fire.

Under pretense of making the coinage more durable, Nero reduced its silver content by ten percent, and pocketed the profit to support his expensive tastes. Future emperors continued the process of debasement until the proportion of pure silver was less than two percent. The costs of Roman high-life soared. The infamous Emperor Caracalla ran through his entire inheritance in one day, and the teenage tyrant, Heliogabalus, spent close to half a million dollars on one orgiastic feast. The depleted Roman treasury issued thinly-plated coins, so valueless they had to be traded by the sackful, and the army was given salt in lieu of its traditional "salt money," or salarium – from whence cometh our "salary."

As Rome quietly crumbled, prudent men-of-affairs retreated to remote castles with such precious metals as they could hoard, gathering their retainers about them in anticipation of the feudal period to come. Byzantium prospered with Rome's decline, and Constantine issued a solid gold solidus to his troops, who became so identified with the coin that later generations of military men were called "soldiers."

In Britain, Gaul and Scandinavia cattle still comprised a currency that even a Caesar couldn't counterfeit. The wily barbarians, never too impressed by coinage, preferred to deal in metals by weight. The Norsemen used a cow's ear, or öre, as a standard for weighing rings and coins, which they treated as bulk metal. The Roman libra pondo, or pound, was the unit of weight used by the British, and £, for libra, still serves as the symbol for the English pound note. The shilling was a scilling, or "a piece cut off" and tossed into the scales, while a coin was a cunens, or wedge, cut from a piece of metal money as a means of making change.

Among the earliest British coins were silver pennies minted during the hesitant reign of Aethelred the Unready, who used them to buy off the marauding Vikings. These coins were known by the Latin name of denarii, and d. still stands for pence in British currency. Crude by machine-age standards, the hand-stamped coins of the Middle Ages were seldom perfectly round. Irregular shapes were expected, and the unscrupulous were able to clip and file the edges of coins, and assemble hoards of silver. Though the culprit, when caught, had his right hand cut off in punishment, clipping became a favorite Medieval hobby. By the 1300s money metal was so scarce that kings were forced to borrow from Italian bankers, who charged an interest of 260 percent.

For many years, Italian bankers charged no interest at all on domestic loans to merchants, but penalties for failing to keep a due-date were so high that debtors often announced that they were "bench-broken," or bankrupt. As Voltaire explained it: "Every merchant had his bench (banco) in the place of exchange; and when he had conducted his business badly, declared himself fallito, and abandoned his property to his creditors with the proviso that he retain a good part of it for himself . . . There was nothing to be said to him and his bench was broken, banco rotto, banca rotta; he could even, in certain towns, keep all his property and balk his creditors, provided he seated himself bare-bottomed on a stone in the presence of all the merchants. This was a mild deviation of the old Roman proverb . . . to pay either with one's money or one's skin."

Kings were not inclined to seek relief from debt by public display of the royal posterior, however. Threatened with financial embarrassment, Henry VIII took his cue from the Romans and slyly issued silver-plated shillings. The coins, on which the much-married monarch was depicted in full face, were mostly copper, and constant circulation soon wore the plating off Henry's proud proboscis, earning him the unregal nickname of "Old Coppernose."

During the reign of Henry's daughter, Elizabeth, England's coins were once again restored to proper weight and value. With the rise of the merchant class and the growing sophistication of the cities, the common man's interest in currency increased by leaps and pounds sterling. "Get money; still get money, boy," Ben Jonson urged; while Shakespeare reflected an English attitude as well as a Paduan, when he observed that the worldly-wise Petruchio would willingly marry "an old trot with ne'er a tooth in her head, though she have as many diseases as two and fifty horses," providing she had money.

In 1663, the Guinea coast of Africa provided the gold for a new coin that was logically called a "guinea." But European money was of little help to the adventurers and trading companies that began to exploit the Dark Continent for its ivory, slaves and precious metals. Even today, cattle, camels, sheep and goats are primary stores of wealth amongst many tribes of North, East and South Africa, and currency is based on a cattle standard similar to that of the ancient Greeks.

Like most primitive peoples, the cattlekeeping Africans originally had but two uses for money – to pay a debt of "blood money" to one's victims, or to purchase wives. A girl in the mediumprice range went for three cows and a bull, though most fathers were open to any reasonable deal, and prices were scaled to the year and the model. Since no clear distinctions were made between women and cattle, a man who preferred girls to cows could invest his wealth in wives, and count himself fairly successful when he had between six and ten.

The profit motive in marriage has seldom been more blatantly expressed than amongst the Batetela of Equatorial Africa, whose currency was copper rods. The young man opened negotiations with a simple declaration of love. The girl then replied, "All right, bring the money," and the traditional down payment was made – a dog and eight copper rods, followed by later payments of more dogs, more rods, and chickens. Since installments often lagged over a long period of time, a favorite local taunt was that a man still owed for his grandmother.

The chief Slave Coast currency used by early Portuguese and Spanish traders was the copper or brass manilla – a round bar bent in the general shape of a horseshoe. But the most universally accepted metal was iron, which the natives used to make weapons and tools. These hand-fashioned implements passed as currency, and in time became non-functional tokens. Iron hoes evolved into thin, twisted bars with flattened ends, and became the "Kissi Pennies" of Sierra Leone and Liberia. Axes, spears and lethal throwing knives lost their cutting edges and degenerated into harmless currency, which scholars compare to the mysteriously non-functional swords and axes that have been found in the prehistoric barrows of Britain and the Continent.

Mysterious, too, are the origins of African mosaic trade beads, which the natives believe grew out of the ground. But beads, copper and iron were minor currencies compared to cowry shells – the most widely-distributed money the world has ever known. These small, tiger-striped shells were familiar to Phoenician traders, and are believed to have been used as Roman fertility symbols. Vaginal in appearance, and impossible to counterfeit, cowries were standard currency in Africa, India, the Pacific Islands and ancient China. Chinese word characters for "riches," "prices," "buying" and "selling" all contain the early symbol for "shell," and cowries were in daily use until the close of the Second Century B.C., when the first Sublime Emperor outlawed them in favor of round brass coins with square holes in the center.

Since Chinese coins were cast rather than stamped, counterfeiting was easy, and 100,000 forgers were nabbed in one year alone. Hoping to foil the free-lance money artists, Wang Mang the Usurper called in all existing currency in 10 A.D., and issued a whole new set of coins valued as Wee, Small, Young, Next, Almost, Middle, Mature, Approximate, Second-best and Largest. When even this failed, Wang sought to abandon all metal currency and bring back the more reliable cowry – a remarkably sensible reform, for which he was quite naturally murdered.

Because of the cowry's inherent soundness, Africans usually preferred the shell to European coins. The first coin to really catch the native fancy was the Austrian taler of 1780, which bore the bosomy portrait of Empress Maria Theresa. The demand for this silver coin was so great that it was reissued throughout the Nineteenth Century, and the British Royal Mint had to strike off 150,000 for trade purposes in 1936 – all with Maria Theresa's bust, and still dated 1780.

Coins bearing the well-upholstered image of Queen Victoria were also highly regarded, though her currency was no longer accepted after her death. According to native belief, when the Queen died, her money died too, and was therefore without value. A notable exception existed in Tibet, however, where the Queen's crown was mistaken for the headgear of a mendicant Buddhist monk, and Victoria was known as the Vagabond Lama.

Crowns and queenly bosoms notwithstanding, coins of any sort were lackluster loot compared to the exotic currencies traders encountered in the Pacific. In Borneo, for example, currency was based on old brass cannons. Values were established in terms of imaginary units of cannon, known as pikuls, which were applied to such routine mediums of exchange as buffaloes, beeswax and brass gongs. Farther south, on the tiny island of Alor, a more complex system was founded on the natives' singleminded devotion to the accumulation and investment of gongs, drums and pigs.

The gongs were seldom struck, the drums were never played, and the pigs were roasted and eaten only at feasts – which were usually scheduled to coincide with the death of a pig. Borrowing and lending drums and gongs was the sole male occupation, while the women provided for food and shelter. Since a feast was the only occasion when a man could be forced to pay his debts, it was considered sound business practice for a creditor to shoot a debtor's pig and force him to give a feast.

Drums and gongs were spent only for the purchase of wives or pigs. The same sort of bills were paid with dogs' teeth in the Admiralty Islands, while strings of shells and arm rings procured a young girl-mate in Bougainville.

"Buy me with arm rings," the native siren sang to her lover, and an old siren sang to her lover, and an old Melanesian ballad has the boy giving a familiar blues treatment to such lyrics as:

If you did not want me,Why did you tell me to give you a string of red shell-money?Your father demanded two hundred fathoms of red shell-money;That was your price, You unwashed old scarecrow.

You are as old as an opossum.

In equally romantic New Britain, the bride price was roughly that of a used canoe, payable in shells. In other parts of the polygamous Pacific, wives were bought and magicians' fees were paid with boars' tusks, hand-woven mats, small feathers plucked from around the eyes of fowls, flying-fox fur, and discs of polished turtleshell that bore the remorseful-sounding name of alas.

The Pacific is also the home of the biggest money in the world – the Great Stone Money of the Island of Yap. The larger denominations of this cumbersome currency stand twelve feet high, weigh over a ton, and are cut in the shape of huge millstones. A hole in the center permits the native Yappers to trundle the smaller pieces of change around by means of stout wooden axles, but the really big money is kept on display outside the houses of the original owners. Title to a stone may be transferred by means of an inscription, and physical possession is not essential to ownership. One family traded for years on the hidden value of a huge wheel that had sunk into the sea while being transported from a Pelew stone quarry, four hundred miles away.

In the Pelews, where it is abundant, the stone holds no monetary interest for the natives, who are too busy keeping track of their kluks, adeloboks and other bead money, which comes in more denominations than any other currency on earth. Both the Yappers and the Pelew Islanders were inclined to view each other's currency with tolerant amusement, until the United States Navy came along with the funniest money either had ever seen – paper!

Considering that they had already learned to mistrust the trade coinage of Spain, Germany and Japan, the islanders accepted our World War II military dollars with commendable faith – far more, in fact, than Americans themselves displayed when the Continental Congress issued its paper currency in 1775. Despite threats of imprisonment and "loss of both ears," the sons and daughters of the Revolution valiantly refused to honor the scrip, and "not worth a Continental" became a folkphrase for worthlessness.

But money troubles were nothing new in the thirteen original colonies. The first New England settlers had landed on Plymouth Rock with less cash than Junior takes away to camp. High in hopes and low in funds, the Pilgrims made out as best they could by bartering corn, musket bullets and fish.

Contrary to popular belief, it was the pence-poor Pilgrims who introduced wampum to the local Indians, who had never seen bead money before. The first strings were purchased from a Dutch ship's captain, who had learned of its uses while trafficking with tribes along the Hudson River. Though the polished shell beads bore a disturbing resemblance to sinful ornaments, the Pilgrims tried them out on the Indians, who eagerly bought them in exchange for beaver skins that could be sold in England.

Because of tight money conditions in England, only a trickle of British currency circulated in the colonies. Minting was prohibited in America by royal edict, and the settlers took such coin as they could get – Dutch guilders, Swedish dalers, French louis's, and silver pieces-of-eight from Spanish mints in Mexico. It's from the use of Spanish coins that we get our oldest American money term, "two bits," which dates back to the early settlers. "Bit" was the English name for the Spanish reale, or one eighth of a piece-of-eight. "Two bits" were a fourth of this popular silver dollar, and quite properly came to apply to our quarter.

The first American coins worthy of the name were Willow-Tree shillings, which, along with Oak- and Pine-Tree shillings, were minted without royal permission in 1652. But it wasn't until after the Revolution that Americans began to coin money on a wholesale basis. Under the Articles of Confederation coinage powers were granted to the States, who, in turn, granted minting patents to individuals. A man named Mould made copper pennies for New Jersey. Ephraim Brasher issued his own doubloons in New York, where even the John Street Theatre circulated its own privately minted pennies. Citizens of the little community of Castorland, N.Y., proudly flipped Paris-made half dollars bearing the thunderous motto, "Hail, Thou Mighty Mother of Production," while the Federal Congress authorized the minting of copper cents featuring a sundial symbol of Time. "I Fly," Time prudently warned. "Mind Your Business."

In the heady atmosphere of freshly won freedom, minting and counterfeiting proceeded apace until the Constitution was ratified, reserving all powers of coinage to the Federal government. At Alexander Hamilton's suggestion, a dollar "unit" based on the Spanish peso was adopted, but the United States Mint didn't start coining money until 1792. Situated on the site of an old distillery in Philadelphia, the mint opened with a stock of six pounds of used copper, and melted down some of George Washington's table silver to strike off a handful of "half-dismes," which were presented to Martha Washington – possibly in memory of her forks and spoons.

"There has also been a small beginning in the coinage of half-dismes," Washington was able to report at the next session of Congress, "the want of small coins calling first attention to them."

With the mint slowly stamping out coppers and dimes, trade was conducted largely with Spanish dollars, and accounts were kept in a confusion of pesos, shillings and pence. The dollar sign, $, is supposed to have evolved from a bookkeeper's shorthand version of PS, for peso, and the American dollar was hardly more than a theoretical unit used to evaluate other currency, much as Borneo's pikuls of cannon were used to evaluate beeswax and gongs.

During the War of 1812, all coin payments were suspended, and banks issued paper currency that was limited only by the availability of printing presses and the supply of ink. Private banks with wilderness addresses sprang up in the West, and issued "wildcat" notes. In Michigan, where banks were required to back their paper currency with thirty percent in specie, the same bags of coins were hustled from bank to bank, one step ahead of the inspectors. As one official described it: "Gold and silver flew about the country with the celerity of magic; its sound was heard in the depths of the forest, yet like the wind, one knew not whence it came or whither it was going."

In 1834, a "hard money" bloc in Congress pushed for a reform measure that favored a gold dollar. A new mint that operated on live horsepower was set up two years later, and with the discovery of gold in California, the production of gold coins increased to the point where the minting of cents and dimes fell off, and no one had any change. After discussing the crisis for two years, Congress swung into action and authorized a new series of coins in the now-familiar five-to-fifty-cent denominations. The mint worked on a twenty-four-hour schedule, new coins poured into circulation, and America had enough currency to cover its needs for the first time in history.

Pockets jingled but briefly, however. With the outbreak of the Civil War, coin metal became so scarce that paper Greenbacks were declared legal tender. In addition to Federal notes, seven thousand different bank issues were in circulation, together with five thousand odd lots of passable counterfeits. Before the war ended, one third of the money in the country was counterfeit, and in the final days of the Confederacy bogus bills bearing the names of Northern banks were more negotiable than Southern "shinplasters." Out of this near-catastrophic muddle, the legislation essential to a sound currency was born.

Vital as these matters are to our present security, the details are as yawn-inspiring as a good girl's diary – a compendium of dull dates and ever-increasing restraints. This is not to say that emotions never ran high, or that all decisions were the wisest. As a result of William Jennings Bryan's breast beating on behalf of inflationary Free Silver, and the common man's sentimental support of the underdog metal, thirty-five million unused silver dollars are currently creating a storage problem for the Denver mint. Only four hundred thousand are in circulation, mostly in Las Vegas, where they are fed to slot machines, and in parts of Texas, where – it is sometimes alleged – they serve as nickels and dimes. Nevada, scene of the big Nineteenth Century silver diggings, has always been partial to the king-size coins. When the Comstock Lode was struck, the bullion-happy citizens sang:

Oh, give me a silver dollarI can lay on the bar with a bang.

Money that folds may do for the East,But we want our dollars to clang!

In the interests of conveniences and good posture, the rest of the nation eschews the weighty cartwheel and derives its audio satisfactions from crisp, new bills that snap, crackle and pop. Token interest is displayed in our less-bulky coins, however. These include our copper pennies, which are partly tin, our nickels, which are mostly copper, and silver dimes, quarters and half dollars, which – oddly enough – are mostly silver.

The metallic worth of all these coins is considerably less than their face value. A meager twelve cents' worth of metal is required to make a dollar's worth of nickels, for instance, and Treasury officials estimate the annual profit from minting to be in the neighborhood of forty million dollars. At least part of the profit is attributable to a law that makes it illegal to change the design of a given coin more than once in twenty-five years, plus the fact that the outlay for models' fees has been practically nil. Legend has it that when the eagle was selected as our national emblem, the Philadelphia mint adopted a live specimen named Peter, who posed for several early coins, until he got tangled up in the mint's machinery. As a result of his injuries, Peter died, but retained his Civil Service status through the thoughtfulness of fellow-employees, who had the bald bird stuffed.

Though the mint was not on a first-name basis with the bison who posed for the buffalo nickel, the Indian was long thought to be a chap named Two Guns Whitecalf. According to designer James Earle Fraser, however, the portrait was a composite of three other braves – Irontail, Two Moons, and a taciturn type with long braids, who never did give his name.

The Indian on the old penny was a pale-face squaw, Sarah Longacre, daughter of a mint official, while the Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson and Roosevelt coins were all done from portraits. When designer John Sinnock added his initials to the Roosevelt dime in 1946, word spread among the benighted that the tiny "J.S." stood for Joseph Stalin, and was the work of subversives boring from within the mint. Assigned to design the Franklin half dollar in 1948, Sinnock therefore took the precaution of adding his middle initial, "R." This merely touched off a new rumor – the mint's subversives had become so entrenched, they were boldly defacing our coinage with Stalin's middle initial.

As might be expected, the intrinsic value of our paper money is even less than that of coin. It costs only thirty cents to run off a thousand bills, whether their face value is one dollar or ten thousand dollars, and changes in design are much less frequent. The biggest change in the appearance of paper money was its reduction in size, in 1929. A less obvious but more momentous change occurred in 1933-1934, when the dollar went off the gold standard, and paper currency was no longer redeemable in gold coin.

To even venture a summary of the significance of this change is to become involved in a maelstrom of economic theories. Reading the fine print on the engravings in our billfold, however, we find that a ten-dollar Federal Reserve note is "legal tender for all debts, public and private, and is redeemable in lawful money at the United States Treasury, or at any Federal Reserve Bank." The large type, above and below Jefferson's portrait, billboards the comforting guarantee that "The United States of America will pay to the bearer on demand Ten Dollars" – which means that a ten-dollar bill will get you two paper fives, ten paper ones, or a clutch of ten silver dollars. The clinker is that even ten silver dollars will leave you a good deal short of ten dollars' worth of intrinsic value, since the silver dollar contains less than 372 grains of silver, and a full 480-grain ounce is price-pegged at approximately ninety-two cents.

It would appear, therefore, that we are presently trading in government tokens, similar to the debased coinage of Imperial Rome and the Continental paper of Revolutionary America. Actually, no such comparisons can be made. Our modern currency does not pretend to derive its value from the amount it represents in static metal. It is based on the purchasing power of a "commodity dollar," and is more realistically rooted in the nation's capacity to produce and reproduce a wealth of goods and services – a concept which often seems nebulous to minds still operating on the gold standard, but one that would be beautifully clear to the earlier herdsmen, whose cattle wealth reproduced itself time and again through the ages.

But, we recall, it is gold ingots and not "commodity dollars" that the government keeps locked up in the vault at Fort Knox, Kentucky. Surely this would seem to suggest that old-fashioned gold has some uses beyond that of making dental inlays – and it does. Though the huge pile of glittering bricks buried in the mausoleum at the corner of Dixie Highway and Bullion Boulevard may seem as remote from our daily money operations as a twelve-foot stone on the Island of Yap, it is essential to the prestige and support of the American dollar abroad. Gold is still the international medium of exchange, and is needed to cover situations where American goods and services will not immediately suffice.

So important is gold's world function that every major power hoards its reserves with the greed of a lifelong miser. While it is assumed that the United States holds some fifty percent of the total supply, an unknown – though admittedly enormous – reserve is believed to be building up in the Soviet Union. Unlike most of the world's gold, which still includes metal originally mined by the ancient Egyptians, Soviet bullion is largely new metal, which has been blasted and dug from the ore-rich Siberian tundra in a massive mining effort reported to involve a labor force of 500,000.

To what purpose have the Russians initiated this Twentieth Century gold rush? At the moment, it's impossible to say. When the subject of gold was broached during Khrushchev's visit to France in March 1960, the Premier playfully begged the question: "Gold we have, but we save it. Why? I don't really know. Lenin said the day would come when gold would serve to coat the walls and floors of public toilets. When the Communist society is built, we must certainly accomplish Lenin's wish."

No one is so native as to believe that the Soviet is hoarding gold for the purpose of beautifying Russian rest rooms, however. Gold is a valuable weapon to any nation seeking world supremacy. In an all-out economic cold war, its power could be as decisive as that of nuclear weapons in a war that was military and hot. Indeed, the secret stockpiling of gold and weapons invites the speculation that bombs and bullion may be more alike than we had reason to suspect. In view of this similarity, and previously noted instances of weapons evolving into harmless currency, the student of money is prompted to offer the suggestion that a nuclear war might well be averted by simply switching the international monetary base from gold to H-bombs. Since nations are notably reluctant to part with their monetary treasure, the new nuclear wealth would be considered too precious to waste in waging war. It would be kept in vaults and cherished, as gold is cherished today, while money values might be measured in pikuls of non-functional H-bombs, redeemable for the joys of peace.

The more immediate question, however, is not whether dollars and rubles will ever be based on a Nuclear Standard, but whether the whole idea of money might not be on the way out. With the growing popularity of credit cards, one can foresee the possibility of currency gradually disappearing into one vast system of credit. Swindlers and forgers are already switching to counterfeit credit cards.

But the men who know money best are still far from alarmed, and currency buffs stoutly insist that money will never die. As one veteran mazuma hunter put it in an interview, conducted outside the loan department of a large Manhattan bank: "Lissen, if anybody seriously thinks that money is going out of style, all he has to do is to take Benjamin Franklin's advice, and just try to borrow some!"