circulating medium must increase in proportion to its store. If every
one wants a little of everything,--if food must be of many kinds, and
dress of many fashions,--if multitudes live by work which, ministering
to fancy, has its pay measured by fancy, so that large prices will be
given by one person for what is valueless to another,--if there are
great inequalities of knowledge, causing great inequalities of
estimate,--and, finally, and worst of all, if the currency itself, from
its largeness, and the power which the possession of it implies, becomes
the sole object of desire with large numbers of the nation, so that the
holding of it is disputed among them as the main object of life:--in
each and all of these cases, the currency necessarily enlarges in
proportion to the store; and as a means of exchange and division, as a
bond of right, and as an object of passion, has a more and more
important and malignant power over the nation's dealings, character, and
life.

Against which power, when, as a bond of Right, it becomes too
conspicuous and too burdensome, the popular voice is apt to be raised in
a violent and irrational manner, leading to revolution instead of
remedy. Whereas all possibility of Economy depends on the clear
assertion and maintenance of this bond of right, however burdensome. The
first necessity of all economical government is to secure the
unquestioned and unquestionable working of the great law of
Property--that a man who works for a thing shall be allowed to get it,
keep it, and consume it, in peace; and that he who does not eat his cake
to-day, shall be seen, without grudging, to have his cake to-morrow.
This, I say, is the first point to be secured by social law; without
this, no political advance, nay, no political existence, is in any sort
possible. Whatever evil, luxury, iniquity, may seem to result from it,
this is nevertheless the first of all Equities; and to the enforcement
of this, by law and by police-truncheon, the nation must always
primarily set its mind--that the cupboard door may have a firm lock to
it, and no man's dinner be carried off by the mob, on its way home from
the baker's. Which, thus fearlessly asserting, we shall endeavour in
next paper to consider how far it may be practicable for the mob itself,
also, in due breadth of dish, to have dinners to carry home.

FOOTNOTES:

[14] Remember carefully this statement, that Wealth consists only in the
things which the nature of hu