Historical-Political Dissertation on Coins, Both Functional and Commemorative

libuit. For each of these purposes, the coin is customarily distinguished into exchangeable (or usual) and memorial. We shall speak primarily of the former here, while the memorial coin will be discussed specifically in Chapter 2.

§. 5. Principal efficient cause, Public Authority.

Since we have given the causal definition of a coin (as logicians call it), let us inquire more fully into each of its causes. And first, indeed, the efficient cause of coins is in part principal, and in part less principal or instrumental. The Principal cause is Public Authority, which possesses the right of minting coins. For since money is, as it were, a public guarantor, and the administration of public affairs rightfully depends on public authority, according to Conrad §. 19. And although we may wish to abstract this from civil government, positing that this institution initially obtained in a mere state of liberty and natural law among mortals, it must nevertheless have depended upon the imposition and mutual convention of those people, whether tacit or express. For even if one or another private individual had first recommended this medium invented by himself to others, because money is by its nature instituted and invented for the good of the community, it was necessary for it to be done by common approval and reception, so that it might be valid publicly and in common. And since that private and vague license of establishing and defining the value of coins would provide more confusion and disturbance than advantage and profit in human commerce, it must be judged by right to be a function not of private, but of public authority.

§. 6. Origin of coins. Are they to be derived from the time before the flood?

Truly, when this right was introduced, as well as the ORIGIN of coins and their first inventor, nothing certain is known. There are those who opine that money was invented not long after the world was created. Polydorus Virgilius, Book 2, on the inventors of things, ch. 20, derives the use of money from the time of Cain, appealing to the testimony of Josephus, from whose Book 1, Antiquities of the Jews, ch. 3, Hostus (Book 1, History of ancient coinage, ch. 2, p. 10) cites an entire passage: that Cain increased his household wealth through plethos chrematon an abundance of money, that is, a quantity of money gathered through robbery and force, and that he exchanged the simple manner of living hitherto practiced by inventing measures and weights.