MONEY 
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exorbitant sums. A quire of paper sold for ten 
pesos de oro ”—the normal purchasing power 
of a peso de oro was, we are informed, equal to 
the purchasing power of something between 
£2 and £3 to-day—“ a bottle of wine, for 
sixty ; a sword, for forty or fifty ; a cloak, for 
a hundred,—sometimes more ; a pair of shoes 
cost thirty or forty pesos de oro, and a good 
horse could not be had for less than twenty- 
five hundred. Some brought a still higher 
price. Every article rose in value, as gold 
and silver, the representatives of all, declined. 
Gold and silver, in short, seemed to be the 
only things in Cuzco that were not wealth.” 
The quantity theory of money, of course, 
holds also for the totality of money, including 
credit media of exchange, which will be dealt 
with next 
At last, with the introduction of credit 
money, we are brought into touch with a new 
fact. Broadly speaking, credit money which 
is not inconvertible consists in documentary 
promises to pay commodity money, and 
these promises, when complete confidence 
is reposed in those who are pledged by 
them, happen, curiously enough, to be 
competent for effecting exchanges. This is 
the only case, so far as I am aware, in which