prevailing prejudices and false notions of his day:—"That there can be no trade unprofitable to the public; for, if any prove so, men leave it off; and wherever the traders thrive, the public, of which they are a part, thrive also:—That money is a merchandize, whereof there may be a glut as well as a scarcity, and that even to an inconvenience:—That a people cannot want money to serve the ordinary dealing, and more than enough they will not have:—That no man will be the richer for the making much money, nor have any part of it, but as he buys it for an equivalent price."[1] Other writers who immediately followed North, and who all also promulgated some sound principles, though no one of them perhaps with the same complete elevation above the false or imperfect views of the time, were John Locke, in his "Considerations on the Lowering of Interest and Raising the Value of Money," published in 1691, and his "Further Considerations on raising the Value of Money," 1695; Nicholas Barbon, in a Discourse concerning Coining the New Money lighter, published in 1696; and the anonymous author of a very remarkable pamphlet which appeared in 1701, entitled "Considerations on the East India Trade." To a later part of the period belong Jacob Vanderlint's tract entitled "Money answers all things," 1734; Sir Matthew Decker's very able "Essay on the Causes of the Decline of Foreign Trade," 1744; Mr. Hume's "Political Essays," 1752; and Harris's "Essay on Coins," 1757, the views in which are chiefly systematized from the previous disquisitions of Locke and Hume, but which has been described as perhaps the best work, upon the whole, on the subject of money antecedent to the Wealth of Nations.[2]
The Money of this period will not detain us long. The gold coins of William and Mary are five-pound pieces, forty-shilling pieces, guineas, and half-guineas; the
