 In their analysis of the essential properties of money, a number of early modern philosophers climbed several rungs of the ladder of monetary abstraction. George Berkeley, in his short tract The Querist (1725), recognized that the substance used for money was irrelevant, and thus promoted the concept of fiat money, a counter or token that was recognized as legal tender but not redeemable for a precious metal. (Caffentzis 2000). Benjamin Franklin (1729) proposed a novel schema whereby notes were issued with the land as the underlying asset, but the practice was short-lived in colonial Pennsylvania. Hume, while secretary to the British ambassador in France in 1765, oversaw the dismantling of a fiat-currency in Québec that had commenced in 1685 and the reinstatement of British Sterling in lower Canada.