LAST DITCH OF DEMOCRACY - Majority Rights

I repeat in quoting these statements that I might as well be talking
Chinese or Tibetan so far as the average reader or bearer [hearer?] is
concerned. Money is a means of exchange, an implement by which
exchanges are effected, it is a measure of exchange, it is called “a title to
goods,” a measured claim. It is both a title and a measure.
The use of measured quantities of metal should be considered as barter.
Powdered gold was still being used in India when Kipling wrote “Kim.”
He describes the gold broker dipping a wet fly in the gold dust, and
popping it into a box, the adherent dust being his commission on the
exchange.
For thousands of years men have been used to using metal discs,
stamped with an alleged value, and intended to be of uniform weight and
fineness. By the year 649 A.D. the T’ang emperors had found something
more convenient than lugging about bags of metal. Their metal was what
has been metaphorically called earmarked, or held in deposit, and bits of
paper marked with designs, and seals, remarkably beautiful designs,
were put into circulation. Marco Polo found the Kublai Kahn using this
system some centuries later. He thought it a clever wheeze. The idea is
so practical that in— —Sir Basil Zaharoff wrote to the Times about it; or
rather about extending it so that gold wouldn’t have to be shipped from
the vaults of one bank to those of another, across national frontiers.
The Times referred to Zaharoff as a philanthropist. He shared other great
munitioneers’ floral tastes. He was, I believe, a grower, or at least a
connoisseur of roses. Whatever you think money is, or whatever
Zaharoff thought about gold, Arthur Kitson quite conclusively pointed
out in his report to the Cunliffe Commission that something had
happened to money not once but several times over. His report was
printed under the title “The Banker’s Conspiracy.”
METATHEMENON TE TON KRUMENON, as I think Aristotle
remarked. The Voluntary variation of the value or purchasing power, or