ents.

I remember reading in the Roman historian Sallust of a financial crisis
which was ended by debts contracted in silver being paid off in
copper--_argentum aere solutum est_.

A few years before Adam Smith wrote his chapter on money, Frederick the
Great, during the Seven Years' War, resorted to the Jew, Ephraim, who
coined tin silver:

Outside noble, inside slim,
Outside Frederick, inside Ephraim.

But Frederick, wiser and more honest than our European belligerents,
made it his first care after the peace to restore an honest silver
coinage.

A lively example from English, or rather Irish, history is supplied by
Macaulay and belongs to the year 1689. It is one of the incidents in
James the Second's brief and luckless government of Ireland:

It is remarkable that while the King [James II] was losing the
confidence and good will of the Irish Commons by faintly defending
against them, in one quarter, the institution of property, he was
himself, in another quarter, attacking that institution with a
violence, if possible more reckless than theirs.

He soon found that no money came into his Exchequer. The cause was
sufficiently obvious. Trade was at an end. Floating capital had
been withdrawn in great masses from the island. Of the fixed
capital much had been destroyed, and the rest was lying idle.
Thousands of those Protestants who were the most industrious and
intelligent part of the population had emigrated to England.
Thousands had taken refuge in the places which still held out for
William and Mary. Of the Roman Catholic peasantry, who were in the
vigor of life, the majority had enlisted in the army or had joined
gangs of plunderers. The poverty of the treasury was the necessary
effect of the poverty of the country: public prosperity could be
restored only by the restoration of private prosperity; and private
prosperity could be restored only by years of peace and security.
James was absurd enough to imagine that there was a more speedy and
efficacious remedy. He could, he conceived, at once extricate
himself from his financial difficulties by the simple process of
calling a farthing a shilling.

The right of coining was undoubtedly a flower of the prerogative;
and, in his view, the right of coining included the right of
debasing the coin. Pots, pans, knockers of doors, pieces of
ordnance which h