means of payment, as soon as some shock causes a violent interruption of the flow of payments and disturbs the mechanism of their settlement. Thus, under conditions of fully developed capitalist production, where the commodity owner has long become a capitalist, knows his Adam Smith, and condescendingly laughs at the superstition that gold and silver alone constitute money or that money differs at all from other commodities as the absolute commodity, money suddenly reappears not as a medium of circulation, but as the only adequate form of exchange value, as the only form of wealth, exactly as it is looked upon by the hoarder. In its capacity of such an exclusive form of wealth, it reveals itself, unlike under the monetary system, not in mere imaginary, but in actual depreciation and worthlessness of all material wealth. That is what constitutes the particular phase of crises of the world market which is known as a money crisis. The summum bonum for which everybody is crying at such times as for the only form of wealth, is cash, hard cash; and by the side of it all other commodities just because they are use-values, appear useless like so many trifles and toys, or, as our Dr. Martin Luther says, as mere objects of ornament and gluttony. This sudden reversion from a system of credit to a system of hard cash heaps theoretical fright on top of the practical panic; and the dealers by whose agency circulation is affected shudder before the impenetrable mystery in which their own economical relations are involved.108
Payments, in their turn, require the formation of reserve funds, the accumulation of money as a means of payment. The building up of reserve funds appears no longer as a practice carried on outside of the sphere of circulation, as in the case of hoarding; nor as a mere technical accumulation of coin, as in the case of coin reserves; on the contrary, money must now be gradually accumulated to be available on certain future dates when payments become due. While hoarding, in its abstract form as a means of enrichment, declines with the development of the capitalist system of production, that species of hoarding which is directly called for by the process of production, increases; or, to put it differently,