In the absence of a medium of exchange other inconveniences arise. One is the difficulty of bringing into relation those whose needs are reciprocal. The experiences of Dr. Barth in Africa clearly exemplify this evil:

A small farmer who brings his corn to the Monday market ... in Kukawa, will on no account take his payment in shells, and will rarely accept of a dollar: the person, therefore, who wishes to buy corn, if he has only dollars, must first exchange a dollar for shells, or rather buy shells; then with the shells he must buy a "kulgu," or shirt; and after a good deal of bartering he may thus succeed in buying the corn. . . . The fatigue to be undergone in the market is such that I have very often seen my servants return in a state of the utmost exhaustion.

In this place, better than elsewhere, may be named an obstacle to a developed system of exchange which results from the misapprehensions of the uninitiated. Of the Chi-tralis, Captain Younghusband tells us that they supposed rupees to be ornaments only, and could not understand receiving them in payment for work. Pirn and Seemann say of the Bayano Indians that:

They do not seem to understand exactly the value of money, and think that the true drift of making a bargain consists in offering a sum different to that demanded. I happened to be in a shop when four of them came in to buy a comb, for which half a crown [two and a half shillings] was asked, but the Indians said that unless the shopkeeper would take three shillings they could not think of having it.

Here "the higgling of the market" is exhibited under its general form - the expression of a difference between the estimates of buyer and seller; and, showing that lack of discrimination characterizing low intelligences, there is a confusion between the two ways of asserting the difference.

[SiR HenRy Maine in one of his lectures, cited below, shows that the modern ideas of competition-rent for land and of the sale of land by individuals were not known in primitive communities. Rents were determined by custom. Rack-rent, an Irish term sometimes used to indicate an extreme competition-rent, was really the rent exacted from a person of a strange tribe in contrast with "a fair rent, from one of the tribe." "In a primitive society the person who submits to extreme terms from one group is pretty sure to be an outcast thrown on the world by the breaking up and dispersion of some other group, and the effect of giving him land on these terms is not to bring him under the description of a tenant as understood by the economists, but to reduce him to a condition resembling predial servitude."

The author then broadens his inquiry to that of the origin of competition-price, or market-price in general; competition-rent of land being, as he shows, but one case of market-price. We quote below most of pages 189-201, in the chapter on "The early history of price and rent" from Village-Communities in the East and West", six lectures delivered at Oxford. First published 1871; quotations from the third edition, 1876, by courtesy of the publisher, John Murray, Alber-marle Street, London.]

It would almost certainly be labor wasted to search among the records of ancient law for any trace of the ideas which we associate with competition-rents. But if land in primitive times was very rarely sold or (in our sense) rented, and if movable property was very rarely hired for money, it is at least probable that from a very early date movables were purchased. It does not appear to me quite a hopeless undertaking to trace the gradual development of the notions connected with price; and here, if at all, we shall be able to follow the early history of bargaining or competition. Nor, if we can discover any primitive ideas on the point, need we hesitate to transfer them from the sale of movables to the competition of land. The Roman lawyers remark of the two contracts called Sale for Price, and Hiring for Consideration, that they are substantially the same, and that the rules which govern one may be applied to the other. The observation seems to me not only true, but one which it is important to keep in mind. You cannot indeed without forcing language speak of the contract of sale in terms of the contract of letting and hiring; but the converse is easy, and there is no incorrectness in speaking of the letting and hiring of land as a sale for a period of time, with the price spread over that period. I must confess I could wish that in some famous books this simple truth had been kept in view. It has several times occurred to me, in reading treatises on political economy, that if the writer had always recollected that a competition-rent is after all nothing but price payable by instalments, much unnecessarily mysterious language might have been spared and some (to say the least) doubtful theories as to the origin of rent might have been avoided. The value of this impression anybody can verify for himself.

"What, in a primitive society, is the measure of price? It can only be called custom. Although in the East influences destructive of the primitive notion are actively at work, yet in the more retired villages the artificer who plies an ancient trade still sells his wares for the customary prices, and would always change their quality rather than their price - a preference, I must remark, which has now and then exposed the natives of India to imputations of fraud not wholly deserved. And in the West, even in our own country, there are traces of the same strong feeling that price should be determined by custom in the long series of royal, parliamentary, and municipal attempts to fix prices by tariff. Such attempts are justly condemned as false political economy, but it is sometimes forgotten that false political economy may be very instructive history. . . .

What, then, is the origin of the rule that a man may ask - or, if you choose so to put it, that he does ask - the highest available price for the wares which he has to sell? I think that it is in the beginning a rule of the market, and that it has come to prevail in proportion to the spread of ideas originating in the market. This indeed would be a proposition of little value, if I did not go farther. You are well aware that the fundamental proposition of political economy is often put as the rule of buying in the cheapest market and selling in the dearest. But since the primitive period, the character of markets has changed almost as much as that of society itself. In order to understand what a market originally was, you must try to picture to yourselves a territory occupied by village-communities, self-acting and as yet autonomous, each cultivating its arable land in the middle of its waste, and each, I fear I must add, at perpetual war with its neighbor. But at several points, points probably where the domains of two or three villages converged, there appear to have been spaces of what we should now call neutral ground. These were the markets. They were probably the only places at which the members of the different primitive groups met for any purpose except warfare, and the persons who came to them were doubtless at first persons specially empowered to exchange the produce and manufactures of one little village-community for those of another. Sir 'John Lubbock in his recent volume on the "Origin of Civilization," has some interesting remarks on the traces which remain of the very ancient association between markets and neutrality (page 205); nor - though I have not now an opportunity of following up the train of thought - can I help observing that there is a historical connection of the utmost importance to the moderns between the two, since the Jus Gentium of the Roman Praetor, which was in part originally a market law, is the undoubted parent of our International Law. But, besides the notion of neutrality, another idea was anciently associated with markets. This was the idea of sharp practice and hard bargaining. The three ideas seem all blended in the attributes of the god Hermes or Mercury - at once the god of boundaries, the prince of messengers or ambassadors, and the patron of trade, of cheating, and of thieves.