into partnership with the four countries already referred to, still it will be more convenient for my purpose to take the other question first, and, assuming that our own coinage is reformed, to consider what would be necessary in order to bring ourselves within the possibility of a monetary convention with our neighbours.

The simplest plan would, of course, be to abolish our sovereigns, and adopt napoleons. But it is manifest that this would be a most unpopular measure, and practically impossible for any ministry to carry; nor would it be necessary. That which the writer in the Times above quoted has said is perfectly true, namely, that it is not necessary that there should be an actual uniformity of coinage; but it is, if not necessary, at least very desirable that the principal coins of the different countries should bear a simple relation to each other, so that they may be current without difficulty in all the countries indifferently. For instance, in actual practice the English sovereign is now current in France: it passes for twenty-five francs, and you not unfrequently hear it called a pièce de vingt-cing. There is no wonder in this, for the English sovereign is, in fact, worth rather more than the sum for which it passes; the excess in value being generally about twopence. Now, this being so, it seems a great pity that the sovereign should not be made exactly equal to twenty-five francs, or (to compare gold with gold) to one napoleon and a quarter. The diminution in the sovereign would be almost inappreciably small, and the convenience great. (It would be necessary to make a change also in the amount of alloy, as the amounts employed in England and France at present are slightly different; but this is a matter of which the public would know nothing, and with which therefore I need not complicate this paper.) Suppose this change made; the sovereign could then be made legal throughout France, Belgium, Switzerland, and Italy, while, on the other hand, the napoleon would pass in this country for sixteen shillings, and though it would not be admitted as a coin of account, it would be by no means an inconvenient coin of currency.

It is really a fortunate circumstance that, without any premeditation or intention, the gold coinage of England and that of France should stand so nearly in a convenient relation to each other as they do; and as chance has done so much for us, it seems worth a small effort to complete what chance has begun, and bring the two coinages. into exact numerical relation. I shall not enter further into details as to what it would be necessary to do; in fact, there is some opening for difference of opinion as to the best method of bringing about the result; but English common sense will easily arrive at the conclusion. that scientific men and the legislature together could have no great difficulty in bringing about the result of diminishing the sovereign by

the value of about twopence. And this, be it observed, is all that we have to do in order to make the gold currency of England and the four countries of the convention, to all practical intents and purposes, equivalent.

Nor, if this were all that had to be done in the matter of English coinage, would there be much reason to despair of success. The real difficulty is to be found, not in foreign relations, but in our internal arrangements: every child knows the misery of learning the pencetable, and every grown person must feel ashamed of the barbarism of his country whenever he casts up an account. For accounts few arrangements could be worse than that which we have: four farthings to the penny, twelve pence to the shilling, twenty shillings to the pound, are as awkward a basis for a system of accounts as well can be. For currency,-and the reader should ever bear in mind the difference between currency and accounts, between what is convenient for small monetary transactions and what is convenient for the books of a merchant, banker, or shopkeeper,-for currency, I say, the above divisions of coins are not so awkward; indeed there is much to be said for them, and it is in this convenience of currency that the chief strength of the existing system is to be found. For instance, if the small coin the penny, which may be taken as the representative of small commercial transactions, is to be divided at all, it can hardly be divided better than into four parts, with two smaller coins, the halfpenny and the farthing: any more minute subdivision would be almost absurd. Thus, if it should be divided into ten parts, and coins should be made to represent the tenths, the value would be so small as to be almost inappreciable: and we find, in fact, that in France, where the franc is divided into 100 centimes, the two smallest coins in ordinary currency are the ten centime and five centime pieces. Hence, as a matter of coinage, there would be no advantage in decimalizing the penny; the halfpenny and farthing are all we want. Then, with regard to the shilling, the existing division into twelve pence is, apart from the question of accounts, a very good division. Twelve is divisible by 2, 3, 4, and 6; and this amount of divisibility is to be regarded as an advantage in small transactions; so that, looking only to coinage, it is probable that the duodecimal division of the shilling is to be regarded as superior to the decimal. Lastly, with regard to the pound, it would be difficult to argue that twelve was the best number of pence to make a shilling, and then to argue that twenty was the best number of shillings to make a pound: but this may certainly be said, that twenty is by no means an inconvenient number: it has four divisors, 2, 4, 5, 10, the same number as twelve, though different ones; and it may be further said that, looking to coinage only, there would be no advantage in a change.

It is when we come to the question of accounts that we see the defect of the monetary system which has just been described. The essential clumsiness of a system of accounts based upon such a coinage is evident to every one who considers the principle of ordinary notation. Suppose we have a large number of any articles, apples, nuts, or anything else, and we wish to write down the number of them. The principle of counting them, and then writing down their number, is that of putting them in heaps; we must determine how many shall constitute a heap, and the physical fact that men have ten fingers-or eight fingers and two thumbs, which is the same thing-has, as it would seem, caused ten to be the number: accordingly, we gather our apples into heaps of ten, and we find a few over, say six. Next we take ten of our heaps and put them together so as to form heaps of a hundred, and we find a few small heaps over, say four. In the same way we take ten of our heaps of a hundred and put them together so as to make heaps of a thousand; suppose there are three such heaps, and seven of the heaps of a hundred over. Then the result is that we have three of our largest heaps, seven of the next size, four of the next, and six over; and accordingly we write down the number 3746. In this simple principle of always counting by tens is to be found the simplicity of ordinary arithmetic. Now what do we do with regard to money? Suppose the 3746 things above spoken of were farthings instead of apples; how would this modify the process? In the most serious manner possible. Instead of making heaps of ten, we must first make heaps of four, in order to find how many pence we have got; then we must take twelve of the pence heaps in order to find how many shillings; next we must take twenty of the shilling heaps to find how many pounds; and lastly, when we come to the pounds, we for the first time adopt the method of counting, namely, that of putting ten together in a heap, which in the case of apples we should have adopted from the first. And when we write the result upon paper, instead of putting the numbers of the different heaps down side by side, with the convention that each figure shall denote a heap ten times as large as that to the right of it, we are obliged either to separate pounds from shillings and shillings from pence by dots, or to rule lines from top to bottom of our paper, to prevent confusion, and to make addition even possible. The process is palpably barbarous; it ought to belong to a bygone age, like flint guns and manuscript books; it is not a mere question of the number of clerks that would be saved in large banking-houses, but it is a question of doing a thing in the right way or the wrong way, a question of barbarism or civilization, a question of mercy and consideration towards every child that has to learn the mysteries of that absurd thing called compound addition.

But if the present system is so absurd and clumsy, how is it that the efforts which have been made to do away with it have failed? We have had commissions on the subject, motions in Parliament about it, a society established for the special purpose of carrying out improvements in this and kindred matters. How is it that nothing has been done beyond the coining of florins, which we were told was the first step towards decimalizing our coinage?

I believe that this question is easily answered, and further, that as long as attempts are made in the directions in which hitherto they have been made, failure will be the necessary result. This I wish to explain as clearly as possible.

It will be observed that if the question were merely one of accounts, there would be no great difficulty involved in it; and if the question were merely one of coins, it would not be very important to move in the matter for a reform. The difficulty consists in reforming accounts and coinage together, and in doing so through the agency, not of an autocrat, but of a British House of Commons. An amusing instance of the difficulty which arises in such matters from popular institutions, and of the facility given by autocracy, is to be found in the fact that only a few months ago the Pope, who seems to be able to reform nothing else, issued an order for the decimalization of his coinage. In order to carry a reform through the British legislature it would be necessary to show, not only that the system proposed is theoretically good, but that no considerable practical advantages will be lost, and that no considerable personal inconveniences will be sustained, in passing from the old system to the new. I think that the efforts which have been made hitherto have failed because these conditions have not been satisfied. Let us just consider what the systems are that have been proposed.

In the Report of the Council of the "International Association for obtaining a uniform decimal system of measures, weights, and coins," adopted at a General Meeting, held on March 1, 1865, I find the following passage (p. 14):

"Our Association includes the uniformity of coins in all countries as one of its principal objects; and in the mind of the community generally, the decimalization of the coinage always stood first in importance. It must be confessed, however, that as far as it has gone, the public discussion of the subject has left the question quite undecided. The advocates of decimalization were generally divided into three leading parties, viz., first, those who favoured the pound and mil scheme, which comprised a large number of leading Members of Parliament, and many connected with commerce and banking. This scheme had the great advantage of preserving the sovereign as the unit. It did not disturb the question of the gold standard, and seemed to possess the ready means of decimalization in the tenth part, or florin; but it destroyed the identity of the penny, and rendered it necessary to introduce the cent, a coin rather too large. Second were those who

advocated the tenpenny scheme, viz., the maintenance of the penny as it is, and the issue of a silver coin of 10d., and another of gold of 100d.: whilst the third scheme contemplated taking the farthing as the unit, and multiplying that by 10, 100, and 1,000; having thus a sovereign of 1,000 instead of 960 farthings, or £1 Os. 10d. Besides these schemes many other suggestions were made. One of these was to take the franc as a unit, introducing the French system as a whole. Another proposed to coin a dollar of 4s. 2d. or 50d., and make the unit of 100 halfpennies, the coin being thus nearly equivalent to the dollar of the United States, the five-franc piece of France, and the dollars circulating in China, India, and other countries."

Of the schemes here mentioned, the only one which has been brought very prominently forward-indeed, the only one which there would be the faintest hope of carrying into effect-is that which stands first in the list, and which is popularly called the pound and mil scheme. It seems to me that the explanation of the failure of our money reformers is to be found, to a great extent, in the fact that they have concentrated their attention so much upon this scheme: popularly, the notion of a reform of the English monetary system has been -almost identified with that of pounds and mils; and when the scheme failed to commend itself to certain influential persons, whose co-operation was absolutely necessary for its success, its failure damaged the whole question of monetary reform. I purpose to examine the causes of the failure of the pound and mil scheme, which are briefly touched upon in the above extract, and then to show that a scheme may be propounded having all the advantages of the pound and mil scheme, and none of its disadvantages.

The principle of taking the pound sterling as the unit, and then cutting it up into tenth and hundredth parts, seems so simple and elegant, that, looking at it merely from the theoretical and scientific side, we may be disposed to wonder why it has not met with universal acceptation; but, on the other hand, looking upon it from the practical side, the objections are so great that we rather wonder how any wise men could have been so run away with by their theoretical and scientific notions as to believe that the country could be induced to adopt it. Let us just observe what it involves. The pound sterling contains 20 shillings; consequently the second coin of account will be 2 shillings, or the florin. The florin contains 24 pence; consequently the next coin of account will be 24 pence, or very nearly twopence-halfpenny; this we must call the cent. Fractions of this coin would be too large to be omitted in accounts; it would not be possible for bankers to make the rule which they do now with regard to pence, namely, that they will not encumber their books with halfpence and farthings; consequently we must have another coin of account, the mil, which will be 24 of a penny, or very nearly a farthing,