keepers' savings or "remnant money" and not as sources of large-scale commercial credit. He denounced paper money as an evil second only to taxation. Paper money had "no real value in itself'; its value depended only on "accident, caprice and party." Gold and silver alone—solid, substantial, "sacred"—could be trusted.

Money, when considered as the fruit of many years' industry, as the reward of labour, sweat and toil, as the widow's dowry and children's portion, and as the means of procuring the necessaries and alleviating the afflictions of life, and making old age a scene of rest, has something in it sacred that is not to be sported with, or trusted to the airy bubble of paper currency.

Andrew Jackson, another hard-money man, later praised The Rights of Man as a book "more enduring than all the piles of marble and granite man can erect"—a phrase highly expressive of the preoccupation with solid, durable objects that was so characteristic of the hard-money ideology.

That ideology can be described as "vintage liberalism" only if it is judged against the standards of modern social democracy, according to which a belief in equality implies opposition to private property and support for governmental regulation of the market. It is true that Paine took the position, in The Rights of Man (1792), that "commerce is capable of taking care of itself." But he favored price controls during the revolutionary war, advocated a progressive system of taxation, and condemned "all accumulation ... of personal property, beyond what a man's own hands produce." These opinions lead Eric Foner to characterize Paine's economic program as an early version of the welfare state; but this label seems almost as inappropriate as laissez-faire liberalism. In Agrarian Justice (1795), Paine urged that the fund accumulated by taxes on unearned increment be used to "relieve misery," to support the "aged poor," and "to furnish the rising generation with the means to prevent their becoming poor."

When a young couple begin the world [he explained], the difference is exceedingly great whether they begin with nothing

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