Excerpt from The Nature and Uses of Money and Mixed Currency: With a History of the Wickaboag Bank N 0 person produces everything he wishes to consume. Even in savage life, one man can procure fish, another venison most advantageously, and they will accordingly wish to exchange pro ducts. This is called barter, and is the first and Simplest form of exchange. AS the civilized state appears, the necessity for an interchange of commodities is vastly increased. The hatter, tailor, shoe maker, farmer, and fisherman, all must exchange with each other, and traffic becomes one of the greatest departments of industry. But barter, under these circumstances, is a very inconvenient and clumsy mode of effecting the desired object. For example, the farmer proposes to exchange wheat for a hat; but the hatter, having already obtained all the wheat he wants, tells the farmer, that if he will procure him a table, he will give him a hat in exchange for it. The farmer now goes to the cabinet-maker and offers to exchange wheat for a table; but the cabinet-maker, already supplied with wheat, tells him if he will procure a pair of boots, he Will let him have a table. The farmer now goes to the bootmaker, who, we will suppose, is willing to take. Wheat, and the farmer gets the boots. With these he procures a table, with which, in turn, he gets the object he desired viz., a hat. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.