MONEY.
From the days of Plato and Lycurgus to the present times, Social
Reformers have sought to restrict or banish the use of money. We do not
doubt that its moderate use is essential to civilization and promotive
of human happiness and well-being--and we entertain as little doubt,
that its excessive use is the most potent of all causes of human
inequality of condition, of excessive wealth and luxury with the few,
and of great destitution and suffering with the many, and of general
effeminacy and corruption of morals. Money is the great weapon in free,
equal, and competitive society, which skill and capital employ in the
war of the wits, to exploitate and oppress the poor, the improvident,
and weak-minded. Its evil effects are greatly aggravated by the credit
and banking systems, and by the facilities of intercommunication and
locomotion which the world now possesses. Every bargain or exchange is
more or less a hostile encounter of wits. Money vastly increases the
number of bargains and exchanges, and thus keep society involved, if not
in war, at least in unfriendly collision. Within the family, money is
not employed between its members. Where the family includes slaves, the
aggregate use of money is greatly restricted. This furnishes us with
another argument to prove that Christian morality is practicable, to a
great extent, in slave society--impracticable in free society.
The Socialists derive this idea of dispensing with or restricting the
use of money, from Sparta and other ancient States; and to the same
sources may be traced almost all their schemes of social improvement.
Plato, in his philosophy, borrowed from those sources, and subsequent
Socialists have borrowed from him. We annex an interesting article on
this subject of money from Sir Thomas Moore's Utopia:
UTOPIA; OR, THE HAPPY REPUBLIC.
"Therefore, I must say that, as I hope for mercy, I can have no
other notion of all the governments that I see or know, than that
they are a conspiracy of the richer sort, who, on pretence of
managing the public, do only pursue their private ends, and devise
all the ways and arts that they can find out; first, that they
may, without danger, preserve all they have so ill acquired, and
then, that they may engage the former sort to toil and labor for
them at as low rates as possible, and oppress them as much as they
please; and if they can but prevail to get these contrivances
established by public authority, which is considered as the
representative of the whole people, then they are accounted laws;
and yet these wicked men, after they have, by a most insatiable
covetousness, divided that among themselves, with which all the
rest might have been well supplied, are far from that happiness
that is enjoyed by the Utopians; _for the use us well as the
desire of money being extinguished_, there is much anxiety and
great occasion of mischief cut off with it. And who does not see
that frauds, thefts, robberies, quarrels, tumults, contentions,
seditions, murders, treacheries and witchcrafts, that are indeed
rather punished than restricted by the severities of the law,
would fall off, if money were not any more valued by the world.
Their fears, solicitudes, cares, labors and watchings would all
perish in the same moment that the value of money did sink."