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Which shows an increase of over 50 per cent upon the deposits of the same period for the preceding year.

The quarterly periods from which interest on deposits are allowed are the third Wednesdays of January, April, July, and October. Dividends are paid semi-annually in April and October, at a rate not exceeding 5 per cent per annum. Unclaimed dividends are placed to the credit of the depositor, and draw interest from the date at which they were declared. At the expiration of every five years all surplus profits are apportioned among the depositors of one year's standing and over.

The South Carolina Railroad Company was chartered in 1827, and the construction of the road commenced at Charleston in 1831, and was completed to Hamburg, and on through to the opposite side of the Savannah River to Augusta, in 1833.

It was at that time, and for many years after, the longest continuous line of railroad in the United States or Europe. It lays claim to having introduced the first locomotive of English construction in America, and of having encouraged the first enterprise, through Mr. Miller, of Charleston, to construct locomotives in the United States. The locomotive "Miller great success upon the road for many years.

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In 1835, the "Louisville, Cincinnati, and Charleston Railroad Company' was chartered, the design of which was to have constructed a road from an intersection with the above road to some point on the Ohio River, near the city of Cincinnati. Failing to obtain a continuous charter through all the intermediate States, combined with other causes, this plan was finally abandoned.

Subsequently the "Louisville, Cincinnati, and Charleston Railroad Company" purchased out the stock, road, and corporate privileges of the "South Carolina Canal and Railroad Company," and in 1844 the two charters were united by an act of the Legislature under one corporation, now known as the "South Carolina Railroad Company."

Since 1833, two branches have been added to the original line of road; one by the "Louisville, Cincinnati, and Charleston Railroad Company," from Branchville to Columbia, of sixty-eight miles, completed in 1842; and the other by the present corporation, from an intersection with the Columbia Branch to Camden, of thirty-seven miles, finished in 1848. The entire roads now form an aggregate of two hundred and forty-one miles within the State, under the jurisdiction and management of the "South Carolina Railroad Company."

The following statistics of the South Carolina Railroad are given from the published reports, and information derived from the Bureau Department, by which the progressively increasing business of the road will be perceived. It has developed new sources of wealth in the interior, and added considerably to the commerce of the city, by the facility of placing in a larger market the flour, corn, wheat, and other grain, with the turpentine productions of the interior, which hitherto had been less available there; and, in connection with the lines of railroad extending west from Hamburg, has placed in the Charleston market western produce, which previously sought other outlets.

The cost for construction, including the amount paid for the South Carolina Canal and Railroad Company, is stated at $5,699,736.

STATISTICS OF THE RAILROAD FOR 15 YEARS-FROM 1ST JANUARY TO 31ST DECEMBER IN

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204 342,435

56,785 179,803

162,514

562,296

197,657

1846

204

64,136

172,291

179,399

589,082

186,271

201,481

186,153

656,275

134,302

345,893 1847 204 327,539 77,579 1848 241 352,431 75,149 217,071 318,523 800,073 274,364 The very ample material furnished in the valuable document of Drs. Dawson and De Saussure have placed us under the necessity of extending our abridgment to a much greater length than we contemplated when we commenced the preparation of this article.* We have endeavored to present in as condensed a form as the subject would admit all the more prominent "facts and figures" connected with the commercial history of Charleston, omitting a number of interesting tables relating to the commercial statistics of South Carolina, as not strictly falling within the scope of one of a series of papers on the "Commercial Cities and Towns of the United States."

Art. IV.—CURRENCY-INTEREST-PRODUCTION. †

NUMBER II.

FREEMAN HUNT, Esq., Editor of the Merchants' Magazine, etc.

SIR-Since I last wrote you, I have been gratified by the perusal of the excellent articles of G. B., and Mr. D. Fosdick, in your March number, coinciding in general with my own views. I have also, with no little labor, made my way through Mr. Kellogg's work on "Labor and Other Capital," a bulky octavo of 300 pages. It is not uncharitable to characterize its posed facts and its logic as equally fallacious. The corner-stone of his fabric is the extraordinary assumption that money possesses no real, but only a fictitious value; which value it receives from legislative enactment, determin

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* Census of the City of Charleston, South Carolina, for the year 1848, exhibiting the Condition and Prospects of the City, Illustrated by many Statistical Details, prepared under the Authority of the City Council. By J. L. DAWSON, M. D., and H. W. DE SAUSSURE, M. D., of Charleston, South Carolina.

These statistics were originally prepared by Mr. John B. De Saussure, Factor of Charleston, whose practical knowledge of commercial matters is a sufficient guarantee of their accuracy.-Official Report.

+ Before proceeding with my subject, allow me to call your attention to an important typographical error in my first letter. On page 405 of your April number, near the end of the second paragraph, the word money was erroneously printed many.

ing the rate of interest that shall be paid for it. This novel position he attempts to support by such arguments as these:-that as money is the representative of value, it cannot itself be that which it represents; on the same ground, probably, that a member of Congress, because he represents American citizens, cannot himself be a citizen. Or again-that as money is a mere measure, the material of it is of no more consequence than that of a yardstick, or any other measure; though it might seem that for a measure of value to be destitute of the quality it professes to measure would be as fatal to its usefulness as want of length would be to a yard-stick. Or againmoney is not merchandise, for it cannot be used as a commodity without ceasing to be money; which is about as logical as to say that wheat is not merchandise until it is ground into flour, or a house, till somebody lives in it. But before exposing in detail these multitudinous fallacies, it is desirable to lay down a few premises.

"In all labor is profit," says the wisest of men. In the language of political economy, labor is the source of value. This appears too evident to need proof; it is assumed as an axiom by writers on the science, and is recognized by Mr. Kellogg in these words:-" Property is almost entirely the product of labor. *** In short, every comfort of life is the fruit of past or present labor." (Introduction, p. 15.) The produce of labor may be accumulated, and is then familiarly called property, wealth, or capital. It exists in innumerable shapes, but the term is by common consent restricted to material objects; the bodily and mental capacities of men being obviously facts of too intangible a nature to incorporate in such a science. This is reason sufficient for declining to adopt Mr. Kellogg's definition of labor as a "species of capital;" though it may be admissible in a metaphorical, or a strictly moral sense. Slave labor may even be defined as capital in the strict sense of the word.

The

Value in its various forms is called merchandise, inasmuch as it is exchanged or exchangeable for other forms, or for the labor which produces them. A man may with his own hands build a house, for which his neighbor will exchange a certain quantity of food or clothing; or he may raise cattle and exchange them for the labor of the carpenter or the mason. principle on which these exchanges are adjusted, will be, in the long run, the amount of labor required for the production of the several commodities exchanged-temporarily modified, of course, by the relative abundance or scarcity of each particular commodity at the time of exchange. As most articles of value could not be often exchanged without sacrificing the primary object of their production, mankind have from the earliest ages adopted one particular species of merchandise as the medium of exchange, namely: the so-called precious metals; possessing a variety of important requisites, such as sufficient supply without redundancy, facility of minute subdivision, accumulation, exchange, and transportation, and of long and constant use with but slight injury or depreciation, and, above all, intrinsic value―i. e., they cannot be produced without labor, equal, on the whole, to that which produces the commodities for which they are exchanged. Mr. Kellogg thinks the world has made a great mistake in this selection, but until he can suggest a better, we must be permitted to think with the rest of the world. His own proposed substitute of paper-money is liable to the fatal objection that it possesses no intrinsic value-as serious a flaw as for a Senator not to be a citizen, or for a yard-stick to be fashioned out of dust or smoke.

Here, then, we are directly at issue with Mr. Kellogg. On page 47, he

says:-"It is a popular error that the value of money depends upon the material of which it is made...... The value of lands, and of goods, wares, and merchandise..... depends upon their utility for food, clothing, &c.... The inherent properties of all articles of actual value, are their only valuable properties." As money, therefore, has no such inherent properties, it can have no actual value; for when it is applied to purposes of utility by being converted into plate, it ceases to be money. This argument comprises several fallacies, which I shall attempt to expose in detail. In the first place, Mr. Kellogg's definition of value, though partially just, can have no place in a scientific treatise, because it is utterly indefinite and intangible. In a collection of moral essays, showing what ought to be our estimate of things around us, it may be very desirable to show the folly of attaching a high value to things in themselves useless, or even pernicious; but in a science which estimates the economic relations of things as they are, such distinctions are utter ly out of place. We have to do not with the actual utility of things, but with the value which men set upon them; and this can only be known by the price they are willing to give for them. In other words, the exchangeable value of a commodity is the only value which can be recognized by political economy. The slightest attempt to establish a standard of value arising from real utility, would at once show its utter absurdity. What value would one man set upon a horse, another on a dog, a third on tobacco or brandy? What would be the comparative value of a spacious mansion and luxurious equipage, in the eyes of a pampered aristocrat, a hardy sailor, or an Irish street-beggar? At what price would a diamond, a poem, a musical entertainment, be respectively estimated? Why should a plume of heron's feathers, or an hour of listening to Jenny Lind, be paid for by the equivalent of hundreds of bushels of corn? All these things have doubtless some real, inherent value, apart from their commercial value; but how impossible to classify them according to it, or to find two men to classify them alike! It is clear, then, that this mode of refuting the "popular error" is quite untenable. It may, however, be worth while to observe, that even by this estimate, money has as real a value as half the things for which it is exchanged. Were there no money, other commodities must be exchanged in a way that could not fail to injure and depreciate them. Probably the great mortality among cattle, when they constituted the chief medium of exchange, and were driven about continually till they died, first set men's wits at work to devise such substitutes as gold and silver. A commodity which furnishes a perfectly convenient and accurate medium of exchange, without losing its capacity for utility of other kinds, is surely, under any system of valuation, of far greater real use to the community than diamonds, or heron's plumes, or even tobacco and rum. And here I must remark that the distinction drawn by Mr. Kellogg between money and bullion, is utterly baseless. What turns bullion into money-the government stamp? That is in reality nothing but a public certificate of weight and purity, and therefore of value. Our jewellers stamp their work as being "pure coin"-i. e., pure bullion, and they notoriously melt down coin to obtain material. Money, therefore, never ceases to be bullion; if it did, who would receive it? At the South, bales of cotton are a usual medium of exchange-do they therefore cease to be cotton? Or if I buy or raise a hundred bushels of corn, one bushel to consume myself and ninety nine to exchange for other food or for clothing, does only one bushel possess inherent value, and are the ninety-nine valueless? Or at what stage of preparation for consumption does the "inherent value" of a commo

dity commence? It is evident that no such distinction can be maintained, and that all commodities, the precious metals of course included, have a definite and ascertainable value, varied, of course, occasionally by the causes above-named.

I cannot better sum up the views I have endeavored to illustrate, than by reversing in detail the conclusions of Mr. Kellogg, as follows:

1st. Money is the acknowledged representative of value, and must therefore possess the quality which it represents; just as the representative of citizens must be a citizen, of merchants a merchant, &c.

2d. Money is the recognized measure of value, and must therefore possess the quality which it professes to measure; as a yard-stick must possess length, or a bushel capacity.

3d. Money is the admitted medium of exchange for all kinds of exchangeable value; it must therefore possess that value which forms the basis of all exchange.

4th. There is no more essential distinction between money and the material of which it is made, than between cotton in a loose state and cotton in bales; or between flour in bulk and flour in barrels. The only essential characteristic of both is exchangeable value-the rest being mere matter of convenience.

5th. The precious metals possess this characteristic in a high degree of perfection, combined with such great, numerous, and various advantages as have rendered them from the earliest ages of the world the chief medium of exchange in civilized communities.

Having thus settled the question of exchangeable value, a few words may be devoted to considering its origin, which, I repeat, is to be traced mainly to labor. On this point, and on this almost alone, Mr. Kellogg and we are agreed; and it will be found that the amount of labor requisite to produce a commodity, is, in the long run, the measure of the amount of labor which people are willing to give for it. In other words, the cost will determine the price-the exchangeable value will approximate to the intrinsic value. The exceptions are often only apparent, as when a slave in Brazil picks up a precious diamond; for the whole amount of capital and labor devoted to diamond-seeking may produce no more exchangeable value than the same amount employed otherwise. Or they may be the effect of monopoly. The amount of profitable labor requisite to carry a passenger comfortably 90 miles in three hours over a level country may be correctly represented by one dollar; but a grasping government and a grasping corporation may combine to raise the exchangeable value of an uncomfortable transit of six hours to the triple or the quadruple of that sum. By a similar monopoly, the exchangeable value of a yard of calico may be a shilling, when its intrinsic value is only sixpence. On the other hand, exchangeable value may be, and often is, reduced for a time below intrinsic value-i. e., below the cost of production-by an excess of supply over demand, just as the contrary state of things is caused by an excess of demand, or a limitation of supply. Both evils (except in the case of monopolies) soon remedy themselves; but the more nearly the two values approximate, in respect to all commodities, the more does society appear to approach to a healthy and normal state.

Having now, as I trust, clearly established the fundamental truth that money must possess value, or fail utterly to accomplish the end of its exitence, I will devote a few remarks to Chap. II., Sec. VI., pp. 65–73 of Mr. Kellogg's work, though the grand foundation of its fallacies has already be n exposed, and though some of them are so transparent that it is difficult to criticise them with gravity. :—

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