his own work that the bourgeois reason is the normal human reason, also took up the challenge against Lowndes. John Locke carried the day and money borrowed at ten or fourteen shillings to a guinea was repaid in guineas of twenty shillings.49 SIR JAMES STEUART sums up the entire transaction as follows: “ ... the state gained considerably upon the score of taxes, as well as the creditors upon their capitals and interest; and the nation, which was the principal loser, was pleased; because their standard (The standard of their own value) was not debased.”50 Steuart thought that the nation would prove more alert with the further development of commerce. He was mistaken. About 120 years later the same quid pro quo was repeated.
It was just in the order of things that Bishop BERKELEY, the representative of a mystical idealism in English philosophy, should have given a theoretical turn to the doctrine of the ideal unit of measure of money, something which the practical “Secretary to the Treasury” had failed to do. He asks: “Whether the terms Crown, Livre, Pound Sterling, etc., are not to be considered as Exponents or Denominations of such Proportion? [namely proportions of abstract value as such.] And whether Gold, Silver, and Paper are not Tickets or Counters for Reckoning, Recording and Transferring thereof? (of the proportion of value). Whether Power to command the Industry of others be not real Wealth? And whether Money be not in Truth, Tickets or Tokens for conveying and recording such Power, and whether it be of great consequence what Materials the Tickets are made of?”51 Here we find a confusion, first of the measure of value and the standard of price, and secondly of gold and silver as measures on the one hand and mediums of circulation on the other. Because precious metals can be replaced by tokens in the process of circulation Berkeley comes to the conclusion that these tokens represent nothing, i. e., only the abstract idea of value.
SIR JAMES STEUART had so fully developed the theory of the ideal unit of measure of money, that his successors—unconscious successors