vised under which a large portion of this great sum may still be em. ployed to subserve the purposes of money without recoinage, this consideration will weigh beavily in its favor.

It happens that the relations of the representative coins of France, the United States and Great Britain, form nearly a geometrical series. This fact has led to a number of suggestions, all contemplating the possibility of bringing these coins, and through them the monetary systems of the three countries, into complete harmony, without entailing any serious inconvenience upon the peoples concerned. Such a result might be reached by adopting the second or the third of the possible modes of unification pointed out above; that is to say, by taking the franc, the pound sterling, or the dollar, at the actual value of the coin chosen, as the money unit; or, on the other hand, by assuming a value having metric relations, unlike any one of these coins, but capable, by slight changes in their several values, of being brought into harmony with all of them.

It is an objection to the adoption of the franc, the sovereign, or the dollar, at the precise values which now belong to these coins by law, that the weight of no one of them is expressible in an exact number of grains or of grammes, or even in a number of grains or of grammes embracing only simple fractions. Notwithstanding this very serious objection, the international conference at Paris did not hesitate to recommend, with a near approach to unanimity, that the French gold piece of five francs, of the metric weight of gr. 1.612903, should be made the basis of an international system of money. To this weight it was proposed to reduce the American dollar, from its present metric weight of gr. 1.671813; a reduction which would diminish its value a little more than three and a half per cent.; and to accord with this, it was likewise proposed to coin the British sovereign of the metric weight of gr. 8.064515 with a fineness of nine-tenths, instead of gr. 7.98805, as at present, of the fineness of eleven-twelfths, (the British standard,) which is equivalent to a weight of gr. 8.13598, of the fineness of nine-tenths; by which change its value would be reduced 88-100 of one per cent.

The argument which seems to have decided the conference in favor of this proposition, was the fact that the French system of coinage is now the system also of Belgium, Switzerland and Italy as well, by virtue of a monetary treaty concluded December 23, 1865, which is to remain in force until January 1, 1880, and longer, if not sooner repealed. A system which has already secured acceptance with half Europe, (excluding Russia and the Scandinavian States,) and which is represented by an actual coinage of no less value than $1,400,000,000, or $1,500,000,000, was presumed to be too strongly rooted to be superseded even by a better one; and impressed with this conviction, the conference believed that Great Britain and the United States would be constrained to adopt the same system, and thus determine its ultimate adoption by all nations.

A request was therefore presented to the government of France, to invite all the governments which were represented in the conference, to signify, on or before the 15th day of February, 1868, their willingness to

adhere to the basis proposed, or the contrary. Up to the present time it is not known that any notices of adhesion have been sent in.*

In Great Britain, a royal commission reported upon the proposition, in July, 1868, unfavorably; and the efforts which have been repeatedly made to secure a more favorable result in the American Congress have thus far failed. There is no prospect, therefore, that the plan proposed by the conference can soon command acquiescence from any nations beyond those which have already committed themselves to its temporary use. Its adoption, had it succeeded, would have established a permanent discordance between the system of coinage and the metric system of weights and measures; and on that account its failure is by no means to be regretted. The fact, moreover, seems to be, that the entire body of the coinage of gold and silver which has been issued from the French mints on this basis is below the legal standard in regard both to fineness and to weight. (Director U. S. Mint Rep. for 1867. Baron Eugene Nothomb in Prussian Annals.) So that, in its present condition, it could never be received as part of an international coinage. The argument, therefore, drawn from its large amount, falls to the ground.

Neither the pound sterling, nor the dollar, nor any other existing coin, except the piece of five-francs, has been proposed unconditionally as the basis of an international coinage. The delegates from Great Britain to the international conference suggested the idea of a ten-franc piece having the value of eight shillings sterling, to serve as a monetary unit, on the ground that this would be more likely to secure acceptance in England than the unit of half that value proposed by the conference; but this suggestion received no support.

All the remaining propositions as yet made with regard to the monetary unit recognize the necessity of deviating, at least to some degree, from the actual weight and value of any existing coin; but they all aim at the same time to avoid so large a deviation as to render the entire coinage of the world, or even a great part of it, unavailable for the uses of money. The most noteworthy of these propositions may be enumer ated as follows:

1. To make the dollar the unit, giving it the weight of 1.62 grammes of standard gold, nine-tenths fine.

2. To make the dollar the unit, giving it the weight of 1.2-3ds grammes of standard gold, nine-tenths fine.§

* This remark is to be understood of the plan of the Paris conference in full. The adoption of a single standard, and of gold only as the standard, constituted an essential part of this plan; and to this France herself has not yet acceded. A disposition to accept the five franc gold unit has, however, been manifested by Spain, Sweden, Austria, Roumania, and Greece; as well as by the nations parties to the monetary treaty of December 23, 1865, to whom, of course, this part of the plan is acceptable.

it is but just to add that these imputations upon the character of the gold coinage of France are said to have been more recently denied by the officers in charge of the French mint in Paris.

Proposition of Mr. George F. Dunning, Sup't U. S. Assay Office, New York City. Letter to Mr. Dubois, U. S. Mint at Phila. Feb. 8, 1868. § Plan of Mr. E. B. Elliott, Am. Assoc'n Adv. Sci., August, 1868.

3. To take as a unit the value of one gramme of standard gold, ninetenths fine, to be called a sol, or soldo.*

4. To take as a common measure of value one decigramme of pure gold.t

To consider these propositions in their order:

In favor of the first, it is urged that it would only require, in the British gold coins, a change of 44-100ths of one per cent., and in the French gold coins, an opposite change of precisely the same small amount, to reconcile them with the Federal coinage; but the Federal coinage, on the other hand, would require to be reduced 3.1-10th per cent. It is unfortunate also, that the change required by this plan, in French gold, is in the direction of increase of weight while the whole mass of the French coin existing is below standard weight already. The proposer of this plau considers it a recommendation that it provides a coinage in which the weights are expressed by round numbers of grains; the unit weight 1.62-100ths grammes, being the equivalent, within an infinitesimal fraction, of 25 grains. This relation is, however, unimportant, since it is to be desired that grain-weights shall cease to be used as soon as possible. The second proposition is that which has been adopted in the foregoing Article. Its advantages are, first, that it furnishes a unit bearing a simple relation to the system of metric weights, but which is yet so nearly identical with the dollar of the United States (about 3-10ths of one per cent. less) as to require no account to be taken of the difference.

It presents, secondly, points of near approach to the monetary systems of the nations in every part of the world, whose populations are most numerous, and whose commerce contributes most largely to the increase of the world's wealth. As a unit of account, it is furthermore likely to prove more generally acceptable than the much larger unit presented in the pound sterling, or the much smaller one represented by the franc.

And, finally, it is a consequence of the long-continued and extensive use in past time of the Spanish dollar, with which this unit is nearly identical, and of the fact that the dollar is to-day the unit actually employed in the commercial dealings of nearly four hundred millions of people, (Dispatch of Secretary Fish, cit. supr.,) that the adoption of this coin as the basis of the international monetary system will introduce no novelty, and will, therefore, require but little effort to make the system universally intelligible.

The following table has been calculated from data found in the "Catalogue Officiel" of the Exposition of Weights, Measures, and Moneys, Paris. 1867, and in the Report of the Secretary of the Treasury of the United States for 1867; together with information furnished by E. B. Elliott, Esq., Statistican, U. S. Treasury Department.

* Mr. Michel Chevalier, in the Journal des Economistes, Nov., 1868, proposes a gramme of gold of nine tenths fine as the unit, or a decimal multiple of the gramme. Dr. William Farr, delegate from Great Britain to the Statistical Congress at the Hague, in 1869, in a report made to that Congress, approves this idea, but strongly advocates the decigramme of nine-tenths fine as the unit, which he would call the Victoria.

+ Proposition of Secretary Fish, in Circular Dispatch to U. S. Ministers abroad, in 1870.

Relations of the Metric Dollar to the principal Gold Coins of Europe, America, North Africa and Japan.

The third scheme possesses in many respects the advantages of the one just considered, and is also recommended as being in the strictest sense metrical, since it presents the simplest possible relation to the metric system of weights. According to this, the weight of a mass of coin in grammes has numerically the same expression as its value in soldos. The following schedule shows its relations to various national coins in actual use.

The proposition of the American Department of State, which makes the decigramme of pure gold the common measure of value affords the following relations, which are here introduced for the purpose of comparison: