Spanish dollar

“ In 1706 a proclamation of Queen Anne put a stop to this practice and fixed the nominal value of the pound in each of the colonies at the existing rate. While the money of account was for each colony a colonial pound, the actual money in circulation was a motley collection of coins of English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish origin. The Spanish dollar was the most widely known and circulated, and it thus became the term by which the currencies of the colonies were compared. In retail trade the shilling as a division of the dollar has persisted to our own day. ”

“ The Spanish or Mexican dollar is here almost the only medium of exchange, payments being made all but exclusively in that currency, whereas gold, even English, is but sparingly used, and then with ill-concealed reluctance! The utter want of any other recognized medium of exchange than silver makes all extensive money transactions exceedingly onerous, owing to the expense of transmitting the precious metals, in consequence of which any one wishing to pay in a certain sum of a few thousand dollars in cash, must employ a convoy for the purpose of transporting the money! ”

“ The horses and mules are small, but willing and patient animals. The natives are sharp traders and boys of from six to ten years of age can drive close bargains. One of our American dollars will purchase exactly twice as much as a Spanish dollar. The one particularly cheap product is the cigars. "Smokes" of a good quality sell for one cent each. Bananas and lemons are cheap, and of the latter fruit we partake plentifully. Cocoanuts sell for five cents each; milk, five cents; bread, twenty cents, and sugar, four cents. These prices are on a basis of the Spanish money. ”

“ We had to throw our theory overboard as a useless burden.
The history of the dollar mark is difficult to trace. The vast majority of old documents give monetary names written out in full. This is the case also in printed books. Of nine Spanish commercial arithmetics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, five gave no abbreviations whatever for the "peso" (also called "piastre," "peso de 8 reales," "piece of eight," "Spanish dollar") . In fact some did not mention the "peso" at all. ”

“ Why should Greaves invent this yarn? I will stake my life, Galloon, upon its being true. Six thousand pounds! And d’ye know, my noble dog, that there is more money in six thousand pounds than your master’s reckoning of the Spanish dollar swells the amount to? In Jamaica the Spanish dollar passes for six-and-eightpence; in parts of North America for eight shillings; and in the Windward Islands for nine shillings ”

“ In the iron mines at Santiago the large American enterprises have already adjusted themselves to the new conditions and are paying their labour seventy-five cents per day American currency instead of a Spanish dollar worth sixty-five cents in Cuba and only sixty cents in exchange for United States currency. ”

“ As a temporary measure, and in view of the fact that this inflation so far as Spanish coin goes has been in force for over half a century, this may be justifiable. The process, however, is entirely artificial, and to continue it would certainly result in many complications. Some Cuban financiers think it inadvisable to introduce American money at this time, while certain planters are fearful lest their labourers should refuse to take one American silver dollar instead of two Spanish silver dollars. ”

“ No lady enters a shop to make a purchase, any more than she would be found walking in the streets.
There is no paper money known on the island, so that all transactions at these stores must be consummated in specie. The coin generally in use is the Spanish and Mexican dollar, half and quarter dollars, pesétas, or twenty-cent pieces, and reals de plata, equal to our twelve-and-a-half cent pieces, or York shillings. The gold coin is the doubloon and its fractions. ”

“ In the Spanish days a Filipino head-servant got 5 or 6 pesos a month, and the peso then was the Mexican dollar, which is only about two-thirds of the Conant unit. It was, and is, riches to them, but so changed are these things now, that we are considered wonderful because we have found a mayordomo or head boy willing to come to us for 10 pesos a month and a second boy for 6. An American would give them twice as much, if not more, which would simply turn them into drunkards, or gamblers, or both, or worse. ”

“ They are great rascals, these Chinese merchants. The currency here is gold, silver, and copper, and they are very cautious in regard to it, being continually on the alert for spurious coin; yet, if they have the opportunity, will put off any quantity of it, and then lie out of it in the most barefaced, impudent manner imaginable. Spanish and Mexican dollars command a premium of from four to six cents; other silver they will not take for its full value. An American half dollar passes for but twenty-five cents among them. ”

“ In the provinces of Havana, Pinar del Rio, Matanzas and Santa Clara, Spanish gold and silver continued in use, along with French gold and U. S. currency, at varying market quotations from day to day, until the adoption of a national standard by the Cuban Congress under the law of October 29, 1914, by virtue of which the Cuban gold peso, of weight and fineness similar to the American dollar, was declared the unit, and United States money a legal tender. ”

“ If a merchant here pay one hundred Spanish dollars for a bill on England, at nominal par, in sterling money, that is for a bill of £22 10s., the proceeds of this bill, when paid in England in the legal currency, will there purchase, at the present price of silver, one hundred and nine Spanish dollars. Therefore, if the nominal advance on English bills do not exceed nine per cent, the real exchange is not against this country ”

“ But the sum expended for public education in Spain is less per annum than the city of Boston devotes to this object.
“Money values in Spain are generally reckoned in reales, a real being five cents of our money. This is the unit of the system. The Isabelino, or Isabel as it is generally called, is a gold coin worth one hundred reales, or five dollars. A peso, or duro, is the same as our dollar: it is a silver coin. The escudo is half a dollar. The peseta is twenty cents; the half peseta is ten. The real is the smallest silver coin. Of the copper coins, the medio real means half a real. ”

“ That was but the first step in the finding of gold and silver in enormous quantities, and thenceforth for a long time the Spanish crown regarded its transatlantic territories as an inexhaustible mine of wealth. But the value of money to mankind [Pg 7] depends upon the uses to which it is put; and here it is worth our while to notice the chief use to which Spain applied her American treasure during the sixteenth century. ”

“ The situation affords a singularly forcible illustration of the power possessed by an inferior money to force a superior one out of circulation. The largest of the debased coinage was only a piece of a quarter of a ryal, equivalent in our modern American system to three cents, yet it had completely demonetized silver and gold, and had become the practical standard of value. The Spanish possessions were the chief source from which the civilized world obtained its supply of the precious metals, yet Spain, in spite of the most arbitrary measures, could retain none of them within her borders. ”

“ I presume it would be difficult to find an American merchant in any of the Spanish States, who had not succeeded in making a fortune by the great advantages of trade in mahogany, dye-woods, hides, and tobacco, almost immediately after commencing business, but who has not as invariably lost it, in whole or in part, by the depression of currency in consequence of the momentary revolutions. ”

“ The true remedy, or rather the keynote of the situation, was contained in a proposition submitted to the Privy Council for the making current of certain foreign coins. "The forbidding of Spanish money in England," says the author Barrett, "was to enrich the Mint, which brought forth contrary effects, for the French, Dutch, and other nations, by advancing Spanish coins, received the greatest profit." He accordingly proposed that the King should raise the Spanish money to be [Pg 148] current in England by proclamation. The double pistolets weighing 16s. to be raised to 15s. ”

“ It was this commanding quality of the Spanish coins that led to the adoption of their system by France in 1641. That in the case of Spain we hear no complaints of depletion of coinage and commercial disturbance resulting therefrom, such as mark the history of the other countries of Europe, is simply due to the fact that her stock of metals was continually being replenished, and that she had no commerce to be disturbed. The gold and silver of America came to her in a steady stream and left her for the Netherlands and elsewhere in a stream as steady ”

“ Next in importance to the fiscal laws for the revenue of the Island comes the currency question. No country can be permanently prosperous unless its currency is sound and its credit good. Bad financial management of state affairs begets bad credit, and impaired credit is the forerunner of depreciated currency. Although Cuba is afflicted with many kinds of depreciated currency, the established basis is strictly gold, and in any commercial engagement the value is understood to be in Spanish gold, unless there is a specification to the contrary. ”

“ The income from across the sea was bound to decrease as the mines were exhausted. The final expulsion of the industrious Moors, shortly after Philip's death, left the indolent Spaniards to till their own fields, which rapidly declined in fertility under their careless cultivation. Poverty was deemed no disgrace but manual labor was. Some one once ventured to tell a Spanish king that "not gold and silver but sweat is the most precious metal, a coin which is always current and never depreciates"; but it was a rare form of currency in the Spanish peninsula. ”

“ Thus we see that Spain presents the curious phenomenon of an expenditure augmenting in proportion as the revenue increases. In most countries the puzzle is the other way; and how, to force the revenue up to the expenditure, is the knotty point with statesmen. The most benevolent can hardly help suspecting that some foul play is at the bottom of this augmentative propensity of Spanish financial outgoings. But Spain is par excellence the country of itching palms ”

“ Another particular which it is essential to note is the uncertain currency of certain silver coinage in Spain, and the prevalence of counterfeit pieces. Strangers must fight shy of any kind of peseta (equivalent to a franc) except the recent and regulation ones, though there are many dating from earlier reigns than Alfonso's, which will pass anywhere. ”

“ These issues were so great that, in 1625, the premium on gold and silver, as compared with billon monies, was fixed at 10 per cent.; in 1636, at 25 and 28 per cent.; and, in September 1641, at 50 per cent. (See account of Spanish monies, Appendix III.)
Such base monies always tend to become the only visible currency of a land. But, save as thereby facilitating the denudation of Spain's store of precious metals, this matter of the depreciation of her billon [Pg 112] money has practically little or no relation to the general movements of the two precious metals which we are investigating. ”

“ To Spain, thanks to the wretched administration of her internal resources, the revenue derived from her few remaining colonies is a great object; and in our hostility to the slave-trade, she beholds a direct attack on that source of income. Again, in the present depressed state of Spanish commerce, a large portion of the commercial capital of the country is invested in the slave-trade; and a constant bitter feeling towards the English is consequently kept up amongst the class whose money is thus employed. ”

“ The country recovered from the collapse of the nineties and entered with full swing into another era of inflation and promotion. The Dingley tariff law, enacted July 24, 1897, had incidentally aided in the process by raising the protection principle to its highest point since the Civil War, but the causes of the upward movement lay deeper. The Spanish War, of course, stimulated trade, for destruction on such a large scale always creates a heavy demand for commodities and capital—a demand which was partially met, as usual, by huge drafts on the future in the form of an increased national debt. ”

“ A diversity of trade brought in its train a great variety in the coin, which was its medium, and a generation now living can remember when the great influx of Spanish coin poured into the colonies in the last century was still in great measure a circulating medium. ”

“ The Spanish discovery of America abundantly illustrates the truths that if [Pg 10] gold were to become as plentiful as iron it would be worth much less than iron, and that it is not inflation but production that makes a nation wealthy. In so far as the discovery of America turned men's minds from steady industry to gold-hunting, it was a dangerous source of weakness to Spain; and it was probably just as well for England that the work of Cortes and Pizarro was not done for her. ”

“ We import into this country, the chief and most valuable products of Spain, those which compose the elements and a very considerable proportion of her wealth and industry, are either untaxed, or taxed little more than nominally. We may still afford, with proper encouragement and return in kind, to abate duties on such Spanish products as are taxed chiefly because coming into competition with those of our own colonial possessions, and on those highly taxed as luxuries, for revenue ”