Robinson Crusoe's Money

David Ames Wells

David Ames Wells

Robinson Crusoe's Money; / or, The Remarkable Financial Fortunes and Misfortunes of a Remote Island Community

Preface

The origin of this little book is as follows: Some months ago, the expediency was suggested to the author, by certain prominent friends of hard money in this country, of preparing for popular reading—and possibly for political campaign purposes—a little tract, or essay, in which the elementary principles underlying the important subjects of money and currency should be presented and illustrated from the simplest A B C stand-point. That such a work was desirable, and that none of the very great number of speeches and essays already published on these topics in all respects answered the existing requirement, was admitted; but how to invest subjects, so often discussed, and so commonly regarded as dry and abstract, with sufficient new interest to render them at once attractive and intelligible to those whose tastes disincline them to close reasoning and investigation, was a matter not easy to determine.

At last the old idea—recognized in fables, allegories, and parables—of making a story the medium for communicating instruction, suggested itself; and, in accordance with the suggestion, a remote island community has been imagined, in which, starting from conditions but one remove from barbarism, but gradually rising to a high degree of civilization, the progress, the use, and the abuse of the instrumentalities and mechanism of exchange—through barter, money, and currency—have been traced consecutively; and the effect of the application of not a few of the most popular fiscal recommendations and theories of the day practically worked out and recorded. And, in carrying out this scheme, the reader will not fail to perceive, by reference to the marginal notes accompanying the text, that hardly an absurdity in reference to exchange, money, or currency can be imagined, which somewhere and at some time has not had its exact counterpart in actual history or experience.

If any apology for the objects designed or the course pursued is needed, the author thinks he finds it in the precedent established by the illustrious Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., who, in the introduction to his “Tales of a Traveler,” thus happily sets forth the special advantage which accrues from the proper employment of a story as a means of communicating information. “I am not,” he says, “for those barefaced tales which carry their moral on their surface, staring one in the face; on the contrary, I have often hid my moral from sight, and disguised it as much as possible by sweets and spices; so that while the simple reader is listening with open mouth to a ghost or love story, he may have a bolus of sound morality popped down his throat, and be never the wiser for the fraud.”

Whether in “Robinson Crusoe’s Money” the author shall succeed in inducing his fellow-countrymen—to whom the ordinary currency medicine is becoming distasteful—to swallow without wry faces the same dose sugar-coated, remains to be determined.

В В В В Norwich, Conn., January, 1876.

Chapter I.

The Three Great Bags of Money

All who have read “Robinson Crusoe” (and who has not?) will remember the circumstance of his opening, some time after he had become domiciled on his desolate island, one of the chests that had come to him from the ship. In it he found pins, needles and thread, a pair of large scissors, “ten or a dozen good knives,” some cloth, about a dozen and a half of white linen handkerchiefs concerning which he remarks, “They were exceedingly refreshing to wipe my face on a warm day;” and, finally, hidden away in the till of the chest, “three great bags of money—gold as well as silver.”

The finding of all these articles—the money excepted—it will be further remembered, greatly delighted the heart of Crusoe; inasmuch as they increased his store of useful things, and therefore increased his comfort and happiness. But in respect to the money the case was e