CHAPTER II.

of the discussion, whenever he feels that an attempt on his part clearly to formulate the question would compel him to settle his accounts with his predecessors. So in the case of the money theory. He tacitly adopts Steuart’s theory when he says that the gold and silver existing in a country is partly utilized as coin; partly accumulated in the form of reserve funds for merchants in countries without banks, or of bank reserves in countries with a credit currency; partly serves as a hoard for the settling of international payments; partly is turned into articles of luxury. He passes over without remark the question as to the quantity of coin in circulation, treating money quite wrongly as a mere commodity.¹³¹ His vulgarizer, the dull J. B. Say, whom the French have proclaimed prince de la science—like Johann Christoph Gottsched, who proclaimed his Schönaich a Homer and himself a Pietro Aretino to the terror principum and lux mundi—has with great pomp raised this not altogether innocent oversight of Adam Smith to a dogma.¹³² It must be said, however, that his hostile attitude to the illusions of the mercantile