ABSTRACT
The utility of money is intense, in the compound ratio of the division of labour and the variety of individual consumption. The capability of subdivision and precise apportionment to the amount of the intended purchase; which capability is a recommendation to all who have purchases to make; in other words, to every member of the community. In a very advanced stage of civilization, when individual wants have become various and numerous, and productive operations very much subdivided, exchanges become a matter of more urgent necessity, as well as much more frequent and more complicated; and personal consumption and barter in kind becomes less practicable. Though a government be the exclusive coiner of money, and is by no means bound to coin gratuitously, it cannot with justice deduct the expense of coinage from its payments, in discharge of its own contracts.
