inhabitants have a continual intercourse. Such a State, therefore, by reforming its coin, will not always be able to reform its currency. If foreign bills of exchange are paid in this currency, the uncertain value of any sum, of what is in its own nature so uncertain, must render the exchange always very much against such a State, its currency being, in all foreign States, necessarily valued even below what it is worth.
In order to remedy the inconvenience to which this disadvantageous exchange must have subjected their merchants, such small States, when they began to attend to the interest of trade, have frequently enacted, that foreign bills of exchange of a certain value should be paid, not in common currency, but by an order upon, or by a transfer in the books of a certain bank, established upon the credit, and under the protection of the State; this bank being always obliged to pay, in good and true money, exactly according to the standard of the State. The banks of Venice, Genoa, Amsterdam, Hamburg and Nuremberg seem to have been all originally established with this view, though some of them may have afterward been made subservient to other purposes. The money of such banks being better than the common currency of the country, necessarily bore an agio, which was greater or smaller, according as the currency was supposed to be more or less degraded below the standard of the State. The agio of the Bank of Hamburg, for example, which is said to be commonly about fourteen per cent, is the supposed difference between the good standard money of the State, and the clipped, worn and diminished currency poured into it from all the neighboring States.
Before 1609 the great quantity of clipped and worn foreign coin which the extensive trade of Amsterdam brought
