irginia, now fighting for the ideas of aristocracy and
labor owned by capital, are the lineal and quite recent descendants of
shiploads of women exported from the crowded capitals of Europe, with
little regard to character or condition, and bought at so many pounds of
tobacco per head. The cannon used by James II. in his desperate struggle
for the throne, were melted up and coined into the famous gun money; and
the bells of Paris which tolled over the horrors of the guillotine, in
the bloody days of Robespierre, met a similar useful end. Charles I.,
with a Vandal hand, melted up the plate of the aristocracy and the
almost inestimable relics of Oxford into siege pieces. In 1641,
Massachusetts enacted that wheat should be received in payment of debts;
and during the French Revolution, the convention, upon the motion of
Jean Bon Saint Andre, discussed the propriety of making wheat the
standard of value.

From coins to wealth is but a step. The ancients surpassed the moderns
in splendid wealth and lavish extravagance. Seneca, writing superb
treatises in favor of poverty, was worth nearly five millions of
dollars. Lentulus, the astrologer, made his black arts yield him over
three millions. The delighted heirs of Tiberius found nearly thirty-six
millions in his coffers, and in less than a year Caligula spent the
whole of it. Milo's debts were Titanic, amounting to six millions. Caesar
had a list of creditors whose name was legion, before he obtained any
public office; but he was soon enabled to present Curio with six hundred
thousand dollars, Lucius Paulus with four hundred thousand, and
Servilia, the mother of Brutus, with a trifle of a pearl worth over
thirty thousand. Mark Antony's house was sold to Messala for over half
a million, and Scaurus's villa was burned at a loss of over twelve
millions. Otho spent over fourteen millions in finishing the wing of a
palace commenced by Nero. One of Caligula's dinners cost a million
dollars; and one of Heliogabalus's breakfasts, twenty-seven thousand
dollars, Oesopus, the actor, swallowed a pearl worth eleven thousand
dollars, and Apicius, the gourmand, ate over seventy-seven millions
during his worthless life, and then committed suicide, because he was
reduced one day to only a hundred thousand dollars in his purse.

I hold in my hand a huge iron token which Ptolemy struck in
commemoration of his conquest of Egypt, and by its side the new two-cent
piece of the United States, fresh