not suspect the real cause of the evil, which was the mandatory character of the debased coin. He noted in this letter the disadvantage which the English merchants labored under in their exchanges with the continent for it is in a foreign country that the coin of a nation must surely answer the test of bullion value. The superstitious awe that hedged a king in his own country had no influence upon the value of his coin when that coin went abroad; nor were the Jews, who were the principal dealers in money and bills of exchange, in the least misled by the king's image on the coin.

A persecuted and plundered race, everywhere in Europe denied the right of ownership in real estate, the Jews had no avenue of commercial activity save the dealing in such personal property as could easily be secreted; thus they found their recompense in the establishment of a monopoly of the most lucrative of trades. Themselves freed from monetary delusions, their course as money-changers operated as a constant protest against the debasement of the coinage, and so contributed to raise the standard of monetary integrity.

The English government having in 1695 entered seriously upon a reform of the coinage by practically giving full weight for light-weight pieces, while at

the same time requiring that both full- and lightweight pieces should circulate at their nominal value, and there being no doubt in the public mind as to the ultimate success of this measure, attention was naturally fixed upon the circulation to note the process of change from the old money to the new. Great was the disappointment when, after large sums of the new money had been coined and paid out, there was no perceptible increase of new pieces in the circulation; they vanished almost as fast as they came from the mint. The financiers and the politicians of that age seem alike to have expected that the new money would soon displace the old, and, as Macaulay has said, they "marvelled exceedingly that everybody should be so perverse as to use light money in preference to good money."

But it was really everybody's preference for the fullweight pieces that kept these pieces out of the circulation, for, as their bullion value was half as much more than the bullion value of the clipped pieces, each person who received a good piece naturally held it and paid out his clipped money. Each naturally sought to appropriate the extra value that the new coin possessed, and this he could do in several ways: he could melt it and sell it as bullion; he could abstract the extra value from it by paring it down

before passing it; or he could hoard it until he found opportunity to pass it at its actual bullion value. All these things were done; but that the rapid disappearance of the new coin from the circulation arose mainly from hoarding by the people who could afford to hoard, was afterwards shown by its reappearance when the government decreed that the clipped coin should no longer pass as money.

For at least a hundred years clipping had been a capital offence; a law was now enacted against melting or exporting coin, but it could not be enforced; nor could hoarding be prevented; even the laws against clipping were ineffective, notwithstanding the terrible punishments inflicted upon offenders. Macaulay narrates that in one day seven men were hanged and one woman burned for clipping, yet the number of clippers multiplied in proportion as the volume of new coin thrown into the currency increased; which demonstrates not only the futility of governmental regulation of a people's money, but its utterly demoralizing effect upon money and people alike. Harsh as was the law against the crime of clipping, it was even more unjust than harsh, for, in compelling the acceptance of debased coin at its nominal rather than at its actual value, the government was in fact an abettor of the crime it was seeking to suppress.

Although the English government, by demonetizing the clipped coin, was enabled to restore the coinage, this action was not prompted by any intelligent perception of the real cause of the debasement, but came upon government and people alike as a dynamic necessity. We have seen that it was the Tegal-tender quality of the coin that caused its debasement, and that if it had been deprived of this quality, individual interest and action would have restored and preserved the coinage in its integrity; but as it was the general belief that money circulated only through the mandatory authority of the Crown, this simple, natural law of money was not perceived. In other words, the trying experience of the English people with their clipped coin did not dispel the delusive idea that the Crown could regulate the value of money; in the belief of the people, the clipped coin ceased to pass because the decree had gone out that it should not pass, and the sound coin passed because the decree had gone out that it should pass.

The same Parliament which decreed that the clipped coin should not pass, also made it a penal offence to give or take more than twenty-two shillings for a guinea, which is conclusive evidence that this Parliament believed in the power of sovereignty to regulate the value of the coin. Silver was then

the predominant money; it was this metal that was the common medium of exchange and measure of values, gold occupying a secondary place. The name "guinea" is still used in England to express twentyone shillings, though the coin is no longer minted or in circulation; the actual value of these gold pieces then, as measured by the new silver pieces, was twenty-one shillings and sixpence, but before the coinage was restored, their exchangeable value, as measured by the clipped money, was about thirty shillings. Though the clipped money could not be made to pass current at its nominal value, it did pass for more than its actual bullion value, for the reason that the government accepted it at its nominal value for the payment of taxes. The decree of Parliament in reference to the guinea was supererogatory legislation, as, after the restoration of the coinage, this piece passed at its normal value of twenty-one shillings and sixpence.

In the act of Parliament which undertook to hold the gold guinea in circulation at a fixed silver valuation, is plainly indicated the mandatory theory of money which, twenty-one years later (1717), led England to adopt bi-metallism, and which has more or less influenced her monetary legislation down to the present time. After nearly a century's practical ex