what are sold at the end
of each year, reserving to himself one-twenty-fourth of the price.
Prices, however, do not vary from year to year, save when, on rare
occasions, an adverse season or a special accident affects the supply
and consequently the price of any natural product--choice fruit,
skins, silver, for instance--obtained only from some peculiarly
favoured locality.

The monetary system, like so many other Martial institutions, is
purely artificial and severely logical. It is held that the exchange
value of any article of manufacture or agricultural produce tends
steadily downwards, while any article obtained by mining labour, or
supplied by nature alone, tends to become more and more costly. The
use of any one article of either class as a measure of value tends in
the long-run to injustice either towards creditors or debtors. Labour
may be considered as the most constant in intrinsic value of all
things capable of sale or barter; but the utmost ingenuity of Martial
philosophers has failed to devise a fixed standard by which one kind
of labour can be measured against another, and their respective
productive force, and consequently their value in exchange,
ascertained. One thing alone retains in their opinion an intrinsic
value always the same, and if it increase in value, increases only in
proportion as all produce is obtained in greater quantities or with
greater facility. Land, therefore, is in their estimation
theoretically the best available measure of value--a dogma which has
more practical truth in a planet where population is evenly diffused
and increases very slowly, if at all, than it might have in the
densely but unevenly peopled countries of Europe or Asia. A _stalta_,
or square of about fifty yards (rather more than half an acre), is the
primary standard unit of value. For purposes of currency this is
represented by a small engraved document bearing the Government stamp,
which can always at pleasure be exchanged for so much land in a
particular situation. The region whose soil is chosen as the standard
lies under the Equator, and the State possesses there some hundreds of
square miles, let out on terms thought to ensure its excellent
cultivation and the permanence of its condition. The immediate
convertibility of each such document, engraven on a small piece of
metal about two inches long by one in breadth, and the fortieth part
of an inch in thickness, is the ultimate cause and permanent guarantee