it, remarks somewhere that even in times of famine, grain is imported not because the nation is starving, but because the grain dealer is making money. In its criticism of the monetary and mercantile system, political economy, by attacking that system as a mere illusion and as a false theory, fails to recognize in it the barbaric form of its own fundamental principles. Furthermore, this system has not only an historic justification, but within certain spheres of modern economy retains until now the full rights of citizenship. At all stages of the bourgeois system of production in which wealth assumes the elementary form of a commodity, exchange value assumes the elementary form of money and in all phases of the process of production wealth reassumes for a moment the universal elementary commodity form. Even at the most advanced stage of bourgeois economy, the specific functions of gold and silver to serve as money, in contradistinction to their function of mediums of circulation—a function which distinguishes them from all other commodities—is not done away with, but only limited, hence the monetary and mercantile system retains its right of citizenship. The Catholic fact that gold and silver are contrasted with other profane commodities as the direct incarnation of social labor, that is as the expression of abstract wealth, naturally offends the Protestant point d’honneur of bourgeois economy, and out of fear of the prejudices of the monetary system it had lost for a long time its grasp of the phenomena of money circulation, as will be
It was quite natural that, contrary to the