Coinage

“ If French coinage should appear too high a price for the interest of other branches of British trade, a question I shall not here determine, let us impose at least as much as to keep our guineas out of the melting pot, and banish all the old coin which throws us into such confusion. ”

“ A depreciation of the coinage under his advice, by the issue of black money, an alloy of the standard silver, irritated the whole nation. When told that his new coinage would certainly be recalled, 'That day I shall be hanged,' was his arrogant answer, regarded as a presage of the death which awaited him. ”

“ Free Coinage.— By free coinage is meant a policy established by law, under which any person may bring bullion to the mint in any amount and have it coined; that is, the amount which the government will coin is unlimited by law. Our country has always had the policy of free coinage with respect to gold. This was also the policy in the coinage of our silver dollars until 1873. ”

“ I must have lost a small fortune in the course of my money-changing transactions, therefore am I a most determined adherent of a uniform system of coinage for all civilized nations; and that coinage, I maintain, should be decimal. Fancy a foreigner getting small money for a sovereign after he has incurred a debt of one and sixpence for a hot salt-water bath on the South Coast! The fair attendant offers him a crown-piece, two half-crowns, two florins, two shillings, two six-pences, two groats, two threepenny bits, a postage stamp, a wheedling simper and a charity-bob. ”

“ Coining of Gold.—If the question should now be asked you, "What denomination of gold money of the United States has been most largely coined since the establishment of the Mint in 1792?" you would probably say, "The gold dollar, of course." The answer would be wrong—very wrong. Less than twenty million gold dollars in all have been struck, and their coinage has been entirely discontinued for nearly ten years. If, on the other hand, the question should be asked, "Which denomination of gold money has been coined most sparingly?" ”

“ Free coinage by the United States will at once establish a parity between the two metals. Any nation that is big enough to take all the silver in the world, and give back merchandise and products in payment for it, will at once establish the parity between it and gold. ”

“ I call to witness the vast sums that have been coined in England since the free coinage was set up. What is become of it all? Nobody believes it to be in the nation, and it cannot well be all transported, the penalties for so doing being so great. The case is plain—the melting-pot devours it all; and I know no intelligent man who doubts but the new money goes this way. Silver and gold, like other commodities, have their ebbings and flowings; upon the arrival of quantities from Spain, the Mint commonly gives the best price, i.e. coined silver for uncoined silver, weight for weight. ”

“ It is Alfred's silver penny struck in London mint. The character of a coinage is quite conclusive evidence in national history, and there is no great empire in progress, but tells its story in beautiful coins. Here in Alfred's penny, a round coin with L.O.N.D.I.N.I.A. struck on it, you have just the same beauty of design, the same enigmatical arrangement of letters, as in the early inscription, which it is "the pride of my life" to have discovered at Venice. ”

“ The coinage in England is entirely defrayed at the expence of the state. The mint price for the metals is the very same with the price of the coin. Whoever carries to the mint an ounce of standard silver, receives for it in silver coin 5s. ”

“ Certainly the issue of our gold coinage, reduced in weight materially below its legal-tender value, would not be any the less a present debasement of the coinage by reason of its equaling, or even exceeding, in weight a gold coinage which at some past time had been commercially equal to the legal-tender value assigned to the new issue. ”

“ Steamships and railroads carry letters half round the globe for a price too trivial to be paid for delivering a message round the corner. The old, awkward methods of making payments have given way to a tolerably uniform system of coinage. Instead of each petty principality and each town having its own coins, as was common, especially in Germany and Italy, before the nineteenth century, all coins are now issued by the national central governments. ”

“ When silver was the unit of value, gold enjoyed free coinage, and was legal tender in the payment of all debts. Now things have changed. Gold is the unit and silver does not enjoy free coinage.
THE PEN MORE POWERFUL THAN THE SWORD.
THE PEN MORE POWERFUL THAN THE SWORD.
It is refused at the mints. We might get along with gold as the unit, if silver enjoyed the same right gold did prior to 1873. But that right is now denied to silver. When silver was the unit, the unlimited demand for gold to coin into money, made the demand as great as the supply, and this held up the value of gold bullion. ”

“ We have now on hand all the silver dollars necessary to supply the present needs of the people and to satisfy those who from sentiment wish to see them in circulation, and if their coinage is suspended they can be readily obtained by all who desire them. If the need of more is at any time apparent, their coinage may be renewed. ”

“ In recommending that the regulation of any silver coinage which may be authorized by Congress should observe these conditions of commercial value and limited legal tender, I am governed by the feeling that every possible increase should be given to the volume of metallic money which can be kept in circulation, and thereby every possible aid afforded to the people in the process of resuming specie payments. ”

“ In a country where the expense of the coinage is defrayed by the government, the value of the coin, even when it contains its full standard weight of gold and silver, can never be much greater than that of an equal quantity of those metals uncoined; because it requires only the trouble of going to the mint, and the delay perhaps of a few weeks, to procure for any quantity of uncoined gold and silver an equal quantity of those metals in coin. ”

“ The expence, therefore, of providing the metals should be thrown upon those who want coin; and the mint should be obliged to convert gold and silver into coin, upon the demander’s paying the coinage.
This coin loaded with the price of coinage, never will be sent abroad to pay a foreign balance; never will be locked up in banks, which will have little occasion for it. It will, therefore, remain in circulation, and serve those purposes for which the inhabitants think fit to employ it. ”

“ What would be the effect of closing the mints and issuing 1,500,000 new coins containing nine-tenths as much gold as the coins above mentioned, assuming that the number of goods exchanged remains the same? Explain clearly. What is the total quantity of such new coins the government can issue and keep in circulation? Explain clearly.
31. A country using gold money as its sole medium of exchange, under free and gratuitous coinage, makes the following change: it imposes a seigniorage charge of ten per cent., but without giving up free coinage or reducing the amount of fine gold in the coin. ”

“ The basis of our dollar of account (when not affected by the exceptional condition of legal-tender notes) is the standard gold dollar of 25.8 grains, containing one-tenth alloy. The actual coinage in circulation may be slightly diminished in value by abrasion, and this may have some effect on the dollar of account. ”

“ Walsh will read the proceedings of yesterday's school, he will see how free coinage fixes the commercial value of silver.
"In the free coinage' of silver as money, the effect is not to increase its exchange value, but to give a permanent and fixed value."
MONEY AS A SCIENCE
"We are now dealing with money as a science, and, strictly speaking, nothing is money except that commodity which has been selected to be money. It is a common thing for us to refer to National Bank notes, greenbacks and other forms of paper money as "money." ”

“ Notwithstanding a coinage by our mints, since 1849, of $874,000,000, the people are now strangers to the currency which was designed for their use and benefit, and specimens of the precious metals bearing the national device are seldom seen, except when produced to gratify the interest excited by their novelty. ”

“ A coin is an excessively hard fact, and should be of just as high interest to the historian as a well-formed skull or any other document. To Englishmen our prehistoric coinage—a national coinage “scarcely if at all inferior to that of contemporary Rome”— [29] ought to possess peculiar and special interest, for it is practically in England alone that early coins have been discovered, and neither Scotland, Wales, nor Ireland can boast of more than very few. ”

“ To order that silver and gold coin shall be struck of such denominations as the King shall think fit to appoint; in which the proportion of the metals above determined, shall be constantly observed through every denomination of the coin, until necessity shall make a new general coinage unavoidable. ”

“ Nobody imagines, I believe, that even the greater part of the annual coinage, amounting, for ten years together, before the late reformation of the gold coin, to upwards of £800,000 a-year in gold, was an annual addition to the money before current in the kingdom. ”

“ THE RATIO BETWEEN GOLD AND SILVER IN EUROPE, 1300-1500.
Germany—A, as determined by the purchase prices of the two metals in the Lübeck Mint.
B, as determined by the Mint ordinances.
[Pg 41]
ENGLAND: COINAGE OF 1344 England.
Even before the adoption of a gold coinage by Edward III., England had felt the effect of loss by exchange, owing to the introduction of gold florins by means of the Flemish trade. In the Parliament of 1339, at Westminster, complaint was made of the want of coinage. It was proposed as a remedy— (1) that every merchant should bring in 40s. ”

“ Provided, however, That the Director of the Mint shall, at the option of the tenderer of such silver, deliver silver certificates in lieu of the standard silver dollars to which the tenderer of such silver for coinage would be entitled and in an amount in dollars equal to the coined standard silver dollars that the tenderer of such silver for coinage would receive in standard silver dollars. ”

“ In gold standard countries the coinage of gold is unlimited, and—not to speak of the small mint charges—generally free. Under these conditions the value of gold coin and gold bullion are the same, weight for weight.57 The silver coin, which is used to some extent in gold standard countries, does not have either free or unlimited coinage at present. ”

“ Coins are a manufactured article quite as much as plate, and are rendered more valuable by being assayed, weighed, and certified. It appears therefore quite proper that those who bring metal to be coined should bear the expense of the coinage, or, in other words, should give up a part of the metal to the mint, thus paying for the service rendered to them in the same manner as those sending letters pay the postal department for their transmission. ”

“ The answer is that coinage is a government monopoly, and though the copper in five cents is not worth a nickel, and the nickel in twenty pieces is not worth a silver dollar, and the silver in sixteen dollars is not worth sixteen dollars in gold, yet, as the government coins them, and receives them, and maintains them at par with gold coin, they are, for all purposes, money equal to each other, and wherever they go, even into foreign countries, they are received and paid out as equivalents. ”

“ Will the people of this country, the financiers of this country, the banks, the moneyed men holding $500,000,000 of gold, with a certainty of the free coinage of silver and going to a silver basis, for that is what it means, put their gold in circulation, or will they hoard it? ”

“ Although a silver coinage, the government, like Japan’s, stands to guarantee the fixed value of the coinage as equal to half its face in gold; that is to say, the central bank will hold reserves so as to redeem or guarantee a silver dollar at fifty cents gold. ”

“ And be it further enacted, That, when silver bullion, brought to the mint for coinage, shall be found to contain a proportion of gold, the separation thereof shall be effected at the expense of the party interested therein: Provided, nevertheless, That, when the proportion of gold is such that it cannot be separated advantageously, it shall be lawful, with the consent of the owner, or, in his absence, at the discretion of the director, to coin the same as an ordinary deposit of silver. ”

“ Various substances have been utilized for the manufacture of token coinage—silver at a lower degree of fineness, copper in different alloys, and nickel. The French term monnaie divisionnaire has much the same meaning; so has the German Scheidemünze. A currency, restricted in amount, but with full legal tender power—such as the Indian rupees and the French 5-franc pieces—is midway between token and standard money. Representative money also bears some analogy to token coinage. ”

“ France and the Latin Union, with less population and wealth than we have, maintained a premium on silver for forty years by opening their mints to its free coinage, and at a ratio of 151⁄2 to 1, while ours was 16 to 1. ”

“ They often earn sixteen or twenty reals per diem, so that the coinage by each fly, in the working hours, must be from eight to ten thousand dollars. The dies are cut by an Italian, and the coinage is exceedingly good, though disfigured by the cap of liberty; which, however discredited in Europe, is still supposed in America to be emblematic of all that man holds most dear. Besides dollars, one and two Real pieces are coined, which are much wanted in other States. ”