Robinson Crusoe’s Money.
By David A. Wells.
New York:
Harper & Brothers, Publishers,
Franklin Square.
1876.
“I smiled at myself at the sight of all this money. ‘Oh, drug,’ said I, aloud, ‘what art thou good for? Thou art not worth to me, no, not the taking off the ground. One of these knives is worth all this heap.’”—Page 9.
Remarkable Financial Fortunes and Misfortunes
of a Remote Island Community.
Late U. S. Special Commissioner of Revenue.
With Illustrations by Thomas Nast.
“It requires a great deal of philosophy to observe once what may be seen every day.”—Rousseau.
Harper & Brothers, Publishers,
Franklin Square.
1876.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1876, by
Harper & Brothers,
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.
Preface.
The origin of this little book is as follows: Some months ago, the expediency was suggested to the author, by certain prominent friends of hard money in this country, of preparing for popular reading—and possibly for political campaign purposes—a little tract, or essay, in which the elementary principles underlying the important subjects of money and currency should be presented and illustrated from the simplest A B C stand-point. That such a work was desirable, and that none of the very great number of speeches and essays already published on these
At last the old idea—recognized in fables, allegories, and parables—of making a story the medium for communicating instruction, suggested itself; and, in accordance with the suggestion, a remote island community has been imagined, in which, starting from conditions but one remove from barbarism, but gradually rising to a high degree of civilization, the progress, the use, and the abuse of the instrumentalities and mechanism of exchange—through barter, money, and currency—have been traced consecutively; and the effect of the application of not a few of the most popular fiscal recommendations and theories of the day practically worked out and recorded. And, in carrying out this scheme, the reader will not fail to perceive, by reference to the marginal notes accompanying the text, that hardly an absurdity in reference to exchange, money, or currency can be imagined, which somewhere and at some time has not had its exact counterpart in actual history or experience.
If any apology for the objects designed or the course pursued is needed, the author thinks he finds it in the precedent established by the illustrious Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., who, in the introduction to his “Tales of a Traveler,” thus happily sets forth the special advantage which accrues from the proper employment of a story as a means of communicating information. “I am not,” he says, “for those barefaced tales which carry their moral on their surface, staring one in the face; on the contrary, I have often hid my moral from sight, and disguised it as much as possible by sweets and spices; so that while the simple reader is listening with open mouth to a ghost or love story, he may have a bolus of sound morality popped down his throat, and be never the wiser for the fraud.”
Whether in “Robinson Crusoe’s Money” the author shall succeed in inducing his fellow-countrymen—to whom the ordinary currency medicine is becoming distasteful—to swallow without wry faces the same dose sugar-coated, remains to be determined.
Norwich, Conn., January, 1876.
Contents.
Chapter I. Page
The Three Great Bags of Money 11
Chapter II.
A New Social Order of Things 13
Chapter III.
The Period of Barter 15
Chapter IV.
How They Invented Money 20
Chapter V.
Chapter VI.
Gold, and How they Came to Use It 33
Chapter VII.
How the Islanders Determined to be an Honest and Free People 50
Chapter VIII.
How the People on the Island Came to Use Currency in the Place of Money 55
Chapter IX.
War with the Cannibals, and What Came of It 60
Chapter X.
After the War 72
Chapter XI.
The New Millennium 83
Chapter XII.
Getting Sober 108
Illustrations.
- Page
- “I smiled at myself at the sight of all this money. ‘Oh, drug,’ said I, aloud, ‘what art thou good for? thou art not worth to me, no, not the taking off the ground. One of these knives is worth all this heap’” frontispiece
- The representatives of labor and the representatives of capital proposing to have a difference 18
- Then the bubble burst; stock companies all failed 29
- The survival of the fittest 52
- A shadow is not a substance 58