it gets used up. Let us take up a sovereign at the moment when its natural, inborn character has been slightly affected. A baker, says Dodd,[1] who receives from the bank to-day a brand new sovereign and pays it to-morrow to the miller, does not pay the same veritable sovereign; the latter has become lighter than it was at the time he received it. It is clear, says an anonymous writer,[2] that in the very nature of things, coins must depreciate one by one as a result of ordinary and unavoidable friction. It is a physical impossibility to entirely exclude light coins from circulation at any time, even for one day. Jacob estimates that of the 380 million pounds sterling which were in existence in Europe in 1809, nineteen million pounds sterling entirely disappeared by 1829, i. e., within a period of twenty years.[3] Thus, while a commodity at its first step into the sphere of circulation, falls out of it, a coin, after a couple of steps within that sphere represents more
- ↑ Dodd, "Curiosities of Industry," etc., London, 1854.
- ↑ "The Currency Question Reviewed, etc., by a Banker." (Edinburgh, 1845, p. 69.)
"Si un écu un peu usé etait reputé valoir quelque chose de moins qu'un écu tout neuf, la circulation se trouverait continuellement arrêtée, et il n'y aurait pas un seul payement qui ne fut matière à contestation." (G. Garnier, l. c. t. I., p. 24.) ("If an ecu slightly used would pass for a little less than an entirely new ecu, circulation would be continually interfered with, and not a payment would take place that would not give rise to controversy.") - ↑ W. Jacob, "An Inquiry Into the Production and Consumption of the Precious Metals." (London, 1831, vol. II., ch. XXVI.)
