Artnit

The importance of money within the system of appreciation is measurable by the development of the money fine. We first encounter in this area, as its most peculiar manifestation, the atonement of murder by payment of money an occurrence so frequent in primitive cultures that it makes specific examples unnecessary, at least for its simplest and most direct form. Less appreciated, however, is not so much the frequency as the intensity with which the relationship between human value and money value dominates legal conceptions.