to a monopoly and thereafter to economic primacy, and forces the other two to be "in form" in his interest, to prepare the wares according to his reckonings, and to cheapen them under the pressure of his offers.
He who commands this mode of thinking is the master of money.[1] In all the Cultures evolution takes this road. Lysias informs us in his oration against the corn-merchants that the speculators at the Piræus frequently spread reports of the wreck of a grain-fleet or of the outbreak of war, in order to produce a panic. In Hellenistic-Roman times it was a widespread practice to arrange for land to go out of cultivation, or for imports to be held in bond, in order to force up prices. In the Egyptian New Empire wheat-corners in the American style were made possible by a bill-discounting that is fully comparable with the banking operations of the West.[2] Cleomenes, Alexander the Great's administrator for Egypt, was able by book transactions to get the whole corn-supply into his own hands, thereby producing a famine far and wide in Greece and raking in immense gains for himself. To think economically on any terms but these is simply to become a mere pawn in the money-operations of the great city. This style of thought soon gets hold of the waking-consciousness of the entire urban population and, therefore, of everyone who plays any serious part in the conduct of economic history. "Peasant" and "burgher" stand not only for the difference of country and city, but for that of possessions and money as well. The splendid Culture of Homeric and Provençal princely courts was something that waxed and waned with the men themselves — we can often, even to-day, see it in the life of old families in their country-seats — but the more refined culture of the bourgeoisie, its "comfort," is something coming from outside, something that can be paid for.[3] All highly developed economy is urban economy. World-economy itself, the characteristic economy of all Civilizations, ought properly to be called world-city-economy. The destinies even of this world-economy are now decided in a few places, the "money-markets of the world[4] — in Babylon, Thebes, and Rome, in Byzantium and Baghdad, in London, New York, Berlin, and Paris. The residue is a starveling provincial economy that runs on in its narrow circles without being conscious of its utter dependence. Finally, money is the form of intellectual energy in which the ruler-will, the political and social, technical and mental, creative power, the craving for a full-sized life, are concentrated. Shaw is entirely right when he says: "The universal regard for money is the one hopeful fact
- ↑ Even to the modern pirates of the money-market who intervene amongst the interveners and gamble with money as "'wares."
- ↑ Preisigke, Girowesen im griechischen Ægypten (1910). These trading forms of the Ptolemaic period were already in vogue, and at the same high level, under the XVIIIth Dynasty.
- ↑ So also with the bourgeois ideal of freedom. In theory and, therefore, constitutionally, a man may be free in principle, but actually, in the economic private-life of the cities, he is made free only by money.
- ↑ The name "bourse" can be applied even in other Cultures, if by that word we mean the thought-organ of a developed money-economy.
