Utopian Economics - Page 2

celebrates a
centenary. The reverse shows the universal goddess of the Utopian
coinage--Peace, as a beautiful woman, reading with a child out of a
great book, and behind them are stars, and an hour-glass, halfway
run. Very human these Utopians, after all, and not by any means
above the obvious in their symbolism!

So for the first time we learn definitely of the World State, and we
get our first clear hint, too, that there is an end to Kings. But
our coin raises other issues also. It would seem that this Utopia
has no simple community of goods, that there is, at any rate, a
restriction upon what one may take, a need for evidences of
equivalent value, a limitation to human credit.

It dates--so much of this present Utopia of ours dates. Those former
Utopists were bitterly against gold. You will recall the undignified
use Sir Thomas More would have us put it to, and how there was no
money at all in the Republic of Plato, and in that later community
for which he wrote his Laws an iron coinage of austere appearance
and doubtful efficacy.... It may be these great gentlemen were a
little hasty with a complicated difficulty, and not a little unjust
to a highly respectable element.

Gold is abused and made into vessels of dishonour, and abolished
from ideal society as though it were the cause instead of the
instrument of human baseness; but, indeed, there is nothing bad in
gold. Making gold into vessels of dishonour and banishing it from
the State is punishing the hatchet for the murderer's crime. Money,
did you but use it right, is a good thing in life, a necessary thing
in civilised human life, as complicated, indeed, for its purposes,
but as natural a growth as the bones in a man's wrist, and I do not
see how one can imagine anything at all worthy of being called a
civilisation without it. It is the water of the body social, it
distributes and receives, and renders growth and assimilation and
movement and recovery possible. It is the reconciliation of human
interdependence with liberty. What other device will give a man so
great a freedom with so strong an inducement to effort? The economic
history of the world, where it is not the history of the theory of
property, is very largely the record of the abuse, not so much of
money as of credit devices to supplement money, to amplify the scope
of this most precious invention; and no device of labour credits
[Footnote: Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, Ch. IX.] or free
demand of commodities from a central store [Footnote: More's Utopia
and Cabet's Icaria.] or the like has ever been suggested that does
not give ten thousand times more scope for that inherent moral dross
in man that must be reckoned with in any sane Utopia we may design
and plan....