Pagina 663 de 2651

The greater part of the writers who have collected the money

price of things in ancient times, seem to have considered the low

money price of corn, and of goods in general, or, in other words,

the high value of gold and silver, as a proof, not only of the

scarcity of those metals, but of the poverty and barbarism of the

country at the time when it took place. This notion is connected

with the system of political economy, which represents national

wealth as consisting in the abundance and national poverty in the

scarcity, of gold and silver; a system which I shall endeavour to

explain and examine at great length in the fourth book of this

Inquiry. I shall only observe at present, that the high value of

the precious metals can be no proof of the poverty or barbarism

of any particular country at the time when it took place. It is a

proof only of the barrenness of the mines which happened at that

time to supply the commercial world.