nished. Then every grain of food and inch of
lodging added to its possessions makes every cent in its pockets worth
proportionally more, and every gain of food it consumes, and inch of roof
it allows to fall to ruin, makes every cent in its pockets worth less;
and this with mathematical precision. The immediate value of the money
at particular times and places depends, indeed, on the humors of the
possessors of property; but the nation is in the one case gradually
getting richer, and will feel the pressure of poverty steadily everywhere
relaxing, whatever the humors of individuals may be; and, in the other
case, is gradually growing poorer, and the pressure of its poverty will
every day tell more and more, in ways that it cannot explain, but will
most bitterly feel.

123. The actual quantity of money which it coins, in relation to its
real property, is therefore only of consequence for convenience of
exchange; but the proportion in which this quantity of money is divided
among individuals expresses their various rights to greater or less
proportions of the national property, and must not, therefore, be
tampered with. The government may at any time, with perfect justice,
double its issue of coinage, if it gives every man who has ten pounds in
his pocket another ten pounds, and every man who had ten pence another
ten pence; for it thus does not make any of them richer; it merely
divides their counters for them into twice the number. But if it gives
the newly-issued coins to other people, or keeps them itself, it simply
robs the former holders to precisely that extent. This most important
function of money, as a title-deed, on the non-violation of which all
national soundness of commerce and peace of life depend, has been never
rightly distinguished by economists from the quite unimportant function
of money as a means of exchange. You can exchange goods--at some
inconvenience, indeed, but you can still contrive to do it--without money
at all; but you cannot maintain your claim to the savings of your past
life without a document declaring the amount of them, which the nation
and its government will respect.

124. And as economists have lost sight of this great function of money
in relation to individual rights, so they have equally lost sight of its
function as a representative of good things. That, for every good thing
produced, so much money is put into everybody's pocket, is the one simple
and primal truth for