Before a well attended meeting of the members of the Union Church Literary and Social guild on Wednesday in the Union Church Hall, Mr. D. B._Verney opened a discussion on " Money and High Prices" by a particularly interesting paper on the subject, of which the following is a brief summary. A Commencing by defining money as the means by which the values of different things are compared against each other, and price as the means of expressing the relative value of two commodities by comparing them indirectly through a universal third commodity, money, Mr. Vorney proceeded to give instances of the wonderful convenience of money in the present state of social organization and the difficulties it moved as compared with the original system of barter, and then drew in outline the history of exchange and barter until the introduction of money. In the course of time metals were found to be the most convenient standards, and in carly times all metals were among the precious things available to men, copper articles and ingots being' the first medium of exchange as a commodity, desirable and of great use in itself. From that time on the choice of metals as money became universal, the only change being the discarding of the baser metals in favour of those of higher value.
Wercurs, Coins ann Notes.
From the first, when the supremacy of metals had been established goods were sold for certain weights of gold or silver, a stage beyond which neither Egypt, nor Babylon nor Syria progressed. The next advance was made by the Greeks, who used electrum, an alloy of gold and silver from which the earliest known coins were made about 700 B.C.
The merit of a coin over a metal currency, the speaker went on to show, was that it enabled those who handled actual coins to accept them for what they professed to be worth without taking the trouble to test them by balance and acid.
Strictly speaking, China was the first country to use coins, but owing to her isolation the fact was not of interest in discussing the natural history of money. Croesus in 561 B.C. changed the coinage from electrum to mintings of gold and silver, creating the double standard which spread over Persia and Europe, and eventually the state assuming control of money said what merey should be "current with the merchant" and ensured the justice of weight and purity of metal in the coins which it minted.
The use of paper money in Eng-Jand had its origin in the commencement of banking by the goldsmiths of London who issued notes or receipts for moneys deposited with them for safe custody, and as they: found it was not necessary to
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.