writers of the period of 1800-1809 and turn directly to RICARDO, both because he embodies the views of his predecessors, which he formulates with greater precision, and because the shape he gave to the theory of money governs English bank legislation until this moment. Ricardo, like his predecessors, confounds the circulation of bank-notes, or credit money, with the circulation of mere tokens of value. The fact which impresses him most is the depreciation of paper currency accompanied by the rise of prices of commodities. What the American mines had been to Hume, the paper-bill presses in Threadneedle street were to Ricardo, and he himself expressly identifies the two factors at some place in his works. His first writings, which dealt exclusively with the money question belong to the time of the most violent controversy between the Bank of England, which had on its side the ministers and the war party, and its opponents about whom were centered the parliamentary opposition, the Whigs and the Peace party. They appeared as immediate forerunners of the famous Report of the Bullion Committee of 1810, in which Ricardo’s views were adopted.133 The singular circumstance, that Ricardo and his adherents, who held money to be merely a token of value, are called bullionists, is due not only to the name of that committee, but also to the nature of their theory. In his work on political economy, Ricardo repeated and developed further the same views, but nowhere has he investigated the nature of money as such, as he had done in the case of exchange value, profit, rent, etc.
To begin with, Ricardo determines the value of gold and silver, like that of all other commodities, by the quantity of labor-time embodied in them.134 By means of them, as commodities of a given value, the values of all other commodities are measured.135 The volume of the circulating medium in a country is determined by the value of the unit of measure of money on the one hand, and by the sum total of the exchange values of commodities, on the other. This quantity is modified by economy in the method of payment.136 Since the quantity of money, of a given value, which can be absorbed by circulation, is thus determined and since the value of