Chapter Two. Money or Simple Circulation
Gladstone, speaking in a parliamentary debate on Sir Robert Peel's Bank Act of 1844 and 1845,[67] observed that even love has not turned more men into fools than has meditation upon the nature of money. He spoke of Britons to Britons. The Dutch, on the other hand, who in spite of Petty's doubts(1) possessed a "divine sense" for money speculation from time immemorial, have never lost their senses in speculation about money.
The principal difficulty in the analysis of money is surmounted as soon as it is understood that the commodity is the origin of money. After that it is only a question of clearly comprehending the specific form peculiar to it. This is not so easy because all bourgeois relations appear to be gilded, i.e. they appear to be money relations, and the money form, therefore, seems to possess an infinitely varied content, which is quite alien to this form.
During the following analysis it is important to keep in mind that we are only concerned with those forms of money which arise directly from the exchange of commodities, but not with forms of money, such as credit money, which belong to a higher stage of production. For the sake of simplicity gold is assumed throughout to be the money commodity.
Endnotes
[67] The Act of 1844 on the Bank of England, passed by Sir Robert Peel's government, fixed a maximum for the amount of bank notes in circulation. These were guaranteed by a special gold and silver reserve. Bank notes in excess of the fixed amount could be issued only given a proportional increase in the precious metal reserves. The Act was repeatedly infringed by the government itself, particularly during the 1847 and 1857 monetary crises. Marx analysed the content and significance of the 1844 Act in a series of articles written for the New-York Daily Tribune in 1857 and 1858 ("The Bank Act of 1844 and the Monetary Crisis in England", "The British Revulsion", "The English Bank Act of 1844" and others (see present edition, vols 15 and 16). Subsequently, Marx made a detailed analysis of the Act in Capital, Vol. Ill, Ch. XXXIV (see present edition, Vol. 37).—303, 404, 414