Under the term wealth, not only ready money but all things both immovable and movable, both corporeal tilings and rights, are included.

Also "Rei appellatione et Causæ et Jura continentur."

Under the term property both rights of action and rights are included.

"Æque bonis adnumerabitur si quid est et actionibus."

Rights of action are justly reckoned under the term goods and chattels.

So the eminent jurist Ulpian says: "Nomina eorum qui sub conditione vel in diem debent et emere et vendere solemus. Ea enim Res est quæ emi et venire potest."

We are accustomed to buy and sell debts payable at a certain event or on a certain day, for that is wealth which can be bought and sold.

So Colquhoun, in his "Summary of Roman Law," says that under the term Merx is included anything whatever which can be bought and sold, no matter whether it is movable or immovable, corporeal or incorporeal, existent or nonexistent, such as a horse, or a right of action, servitude, or thing to be acquired, or the acquisition where it depends on chance.

Thus I have shown you that in Roman law abstract rights of all sorts are included under the terms pecunia (wealth), bona (goods and chattels), Res (property), and merx (merchandise).

The Pandects were published in the year 530 a.d., at Constantinople, but while the official language was Latin, the people were Greek, consequently the Latin Pandects very soon fell into desuetude. They were superseded by Greek translations, and treatises, and at last, in the ninth and tenth centuries, under the Basilian dynasty, they were entirely superseded and set aside as obsolete. A new digest or revised code was published in Greek, called the Basilica, which has remained to the present day as the common law of all the Greek population in the East.

And in the Basilica these definititions of wealth are repeated:

Under the term or wealth, rights are included.

Also,

Under the term goods and chattels, rights of action and rights are included. So in Greek law, abstract rights are included under

(goods),

(estate),

(capital); and they are termed

invisible wealth.

It is exactly the same in English law. In the old law of Normandy it is expressly said that rights of action are included under the term chattels. It was resolved in a case in the time of Elizabeth that personal actions are included under the word goods in an Act of Parliament. So in a well-known case it was said, "But goods and chattels include debts." Things in action are considered as "goods and chattels."

Every tiro in law knows perfectly that it is laid down in every elementary text-book of English law that pure abstract rights are termed goods and chattels, personal chattels, incorporeal chattels, and incorporeal wealth.

Thus in every system of jurisprudence in the world, Roman, Greek, and English, abstract rights of all sorts - debts, rights of action, bank notes, bills of exchange, the funds, shares in commercial companies, copyrights, patents, etc. - are termed pecunia, res, bona, merx - goods, chattels, vendible commodities, and wealth.

I have now shown you, as I said before, that for the space of 1,300 years the ancients unanimously held that exchangeability is the sole essence and principle of wealth : that everything is wealth which can be bought and sold, or exchanged, or whose value can be measured in money. They also showed that there are three distinct orders of quantities which possess the quality of exchangeability, or which can be bought and sold, namely, material things, services or labour, and abstract rights.

And reflection will show that there is nothing which can be bought and sold which is not of one of these three forms - either it is a material chattel, or it is a service of some kind, or it is an abstract right.

I have now, then, shown you that there are three, and only three, orders of exchangeable or economic quantities, and you will at once see that these can be exchanged in six different ways: -

1. A material thing can be exchanged for a material thing, as when gold money is exchanged for corn or jewelry.

2. A material thing can be exchanged for labour, as when gold money is paid for labour.

3. A material thing can be exchanged for a right, as when gold money is given to purchase a bill of exchange, shares, or the goodwill of a business, a copyright, etc.

4. Labour can be exchanged for labour, as when two persons agree to render each other services.

5. Labour can be exchanged for a right, as when wages are paid in bank notes or cheques.

6. A right can be exchanged for a right, as when a banker discounts a bill of exchange, by giving a credit in his books that he buys one right by giving another right.

And these six distinct kinds of exchange constitute the science of exchanges, or of commerce in its widest extent, and in all its forms and varieties.

And if any of the great Roman lawyers, with the materials he had before him, had ever conceived the idea of constructing a complete scientific exposition of the mechanism of the mighty system of commerce, the science of economics would have been 1,500 years in advance of its present state, and it would have saved centuries of misery, bad legislation, and bloodshed to the world.

Now, the law which regulates the exchangeable relations of these quantities is called the law of value; and the least acquaintance with the principles of natural philosophy shows that there can only be one grand general law of value, which governs all exchanges in all their multiplicity and complexity.

And I will now complete this part of the subject by bringing before you the doctrine which is the basis of the theory of credit, and of all other kinds of incorporeal property. It is this: that every future profit, from whatever source it arises, whether from land or from personal industry, has a present value; and that present value can be bought and sold, or can be measured in money, and therefore, by the definition which the ancients unanimously held for 1,300 years, that present right, or the present value of the future payment, is itself an independent article of wealth, quite separate and distinct from the future payment itself.

Thus a bank note or. a bill of exchange is simply the right to a future payment, and every one knows that bank notes and bills of exchange circulate and are exchanged in commerce, by hundreds of millions, quite independently of the money they may ultimately be paid in; and in fact, in modern commerce, bank notes and bills of exchange are very rarely paid in money at all, but by other methods which are too long to explain here.

So shares, copyrights, the funds, the goodwill of a business, patents, etc., are all simply rights to future payments or profits; and they are sold quite separately from those future payments or profits.

It is thus seen that ancient writers possessed the true scientific instinct. They unanimously fixed on one single general quality, namely, exchangeability, or the capacity of being bought and sold, as the sole essence and principle of wealth. They then searched out and discovered all the distinct orders of quantities which possess that quality, and they include them all under the terms pecunia, res, bona, merx -

or wealth, property, goods and chattels, or commodities.

And when we see that the great problem in the science is to discover the single general law, which governs all their variable relations, anyone with the slightest mathematical feeling can at once perceive that we have here the materials of a great mathematical science, because we have a distinct order of variable quantities, and it is perfectly clear that the same general principles of reasoning must govern the relations of this order of variable quantities that govern the relations of all other variable quantities.

We must now bid adieu to those halcyon days when all the world was unanimous, and pass through centuries of war and controversy, till we shall find that at last modern economists have come to the same doctrine as the ancients.