ABSTRACT
Since production is carried on through time, credit arises as a natural consequence. Credit is patterned on the processes of nature. When a man plants something in the expectation of a harvest, he is expending goods and labor in the present for a return in the future, with the attendant risk of loss. The next step is obvious; one man can advance goods to another for a subsequent return. There is no reason to suppose that money created credit, though they might have developed simultaneously. Money is the only means by which deferred exchanges * in goods could be effected without credit. But men give credit, and cannot be persuaded to refrain from doing so, because it is their nature to. By virtue of his mind, man works through time and space. The impulse is not greed, but the creative and expansive faculty. The added risk is accepted for the sake of quicker and greater extension of power over nature.
