ever they had to sell or buy; the
contrivance of coining obviously suggested itself. By this process
the metal was divided into convenient portions, of any degree of
smallness, and bearing a recognised proportion to one another; and
the trouble was saved of weighing and assaying at every change of
possessors, an inconvenience which on the occasion of small
purchases would soon have become insupportable.

Governments found it their interest to take the operation into
their own hands, and to interdict all coining by private persons;
indeed, their guarantee was often the only one which would have
been relied on, a reliance however which very often it ill
deserved; profligate governments having until a very modern period
seldom scrupled, for the sake of robbing their creditors, to confer
on all other debtors a licence to rob theirs, by the shallow and
impudent artifice of lowering the standard; that least covert of
all modes of knavery, which consists in calling a shilling a pound,
that a debt of a hundred pounds may be cancelled by the payment of
a hundred shillings. It would have been as simple a plan, and would
have answered just as well, to have enacted that "a hundred" should
always be interpreted to mean five, which would have effected the
same reduction in all pecuniary contracts, and would not have been
at all more shameless. Such strokes of policy have not wholly
ceased to be recommended, but they have ceased to be practised,
except occasionally through the medium of paper money, in which
case the character of the transaction, from the greater obscurity
of the subject is a little less barefaced.[3]

[3] Mill, _Political Economy_, Book III, chap. VII.

A few illustrations from the past may help us to a critical
contemplation of the present monetary conditions on the continent of
Europe, which constitute fraud and robbery on the most wholesale scale
ever practised by governments (with the style and title of
democracies!) upon the miserable victims, called citizens, and supposed
to be endowed with the blessings of self-determination.

Those who believe that war, if not a divine institution, is at least an
inevitable feature of human society may plead in extenuation of this
species of fraud that it is usually the last desperate resource of a
government which has pledged all its taxes and credit for war or
armam