Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1839 edition. Excerpt: ... because he is well assured, by his experience of the conventional usages of society, that he can at any time receive for his gold and notes an amount of real wealth equivalent to their apparent value. He knows that this money will procure him lodgings, food, and clothing, or any other requisite of life, for twenty or forty years to come, as the amount may be. It matters not whether any of these things be in existence at the time a man receives his money guarantee for them: he knows that there is real capital, somewhere, to the amount of his bond, and that men will toil for and give to him, in exchange for this gold or paper bond, real wealth of every kind to the full amount. It is from these considerations that men buy and sell with money, and give up the real thing for its representative; and upon the same principle, and by the same means, may the working classes purchase from the capitalists all those vast accumulations which the present system of unequal exchanges has enabled them to obtain possession of. The real capital of the country has been estimated to be worth five thousand millions of pounds sterling; and it has been shewn that the value of the wealth annually produced in the United Kingdom does not fall short of 500,000,000, of which the working classes receive and enjoy less than 200,000,000. If the working classes had only themselves to maintain, at tbe present rate, and were they to produce annually no greater an amount even than this 500,000,000, they would, in the course of seventeen years, create wealth sufficient to purchase all the present fixed capital of the empire. But it has been shewn that their position, and the enormous burthens which they have to sustain, will ever prevent them from being..."
