CHAPTER II.

of his theory, while his polemic against the monetary and mercantile system furnishes its practical motive. The importation of precious metals can naturally increase while their cost of production remains the same. On the other hand, a decrease in their value, i. e. in the labor-time required for their production will reveal itself first of all in their increased imports. Hence, said the later followers of Hume, a decrease in the value of the precious metals, reveals itself in an increased volume of the circulating medium, and the increased volume of the latter is shown in the rise of prices. As a matter of fact, however, the rise in price affects only exported commodities, which are exchanged for gold and silver as commodities and not as mediums of circulation. Thus, the prices of these commodities, which are now estimated in gold and silver of lower value, rise as compared with the prices of all other commodities whose exchange value continues to be estimated in gold or silver according to the standard of their old cost of production. This two-fold appraisement of the exchange values of commodities in the same country can naturally be only temporary, and the gold and silver prices must become equalized in the proportions determined by the exchange values themselves, so that finally the exchange values of all commodities come to be estimated according to the new value of the money material. The development of this process, as well as the ways and means in which the exchange value of commodities asserts itself within the limits of the fluctuations of market prices, do not fall within the scope of this work. But that this equalization takes place but gradually in the early periods of development of bourgeois production and extends over long periods of time, never keeping pace with the increase of cash in circulation, has been strikingly demonstrated by new critical investigations of the movement of prices of commodities in the sixteenth century.¹¹⁷ The favorite references of Hume’s followers to the rise of prices in ancient Rome in consequence of the conquests of Macedonia, Egypt and Asia Minor, are quite irrelevant. The characteristic method of antiquity of suddenly transferring hoarded treasures from one country to another, which was accomplished by violence and thus brought about a