inevitably follow when the present coinage was called in be best alleviated? A very large minority wished to avoid the difficulty by keeping the present money in circulation, but lowering its nominal value. This plan, which was in fact to perpetrate a fraud upon all creditors, was not likely to find favour with the four sagacious men with whom the question rested. Two schemes recommended themselves chiefly to their attention. Locke proposed that, after a certain fixed date, the coin should be valued by weight only. This prevented any deficiency in the circulating medium, as the present money would not be withdrawn from circulation, but it threw the whole expense of bringing the nominal and real value of the coin into harmony, not on the Government, but on the individual possessors of the coin. It was evidently fairer that, where the evil was a national one, the nation should bear the expense. Somers suggested that, with extreme secresy, a proclamation should be prepared, saying that in three days the hammered coin should pass by weight only, but that those who held it might bring it in parcels to the mint, where it should be counted and weighed, and immediately restored, with a written promise of a future payment of the difference between the nominal and real value of the coin. Thus the money would be withdrawn from circulation only for the short time necessary to count it, while the nation would subsequently pay the difference. But for this plan secresy and suddenness were necessary, or the intervening period would have given opportunity and temptation for unlimited mutilation of the coinage. Secresy would have rendered it impossible to consult Parliament, and Montague, in the existing state of party feeling, shrank from the responsibility this implied. It was therefore determined to act in a perfectly honest, simple and straightforward manner; and immediately on the opening of Parliament, a Bill was framed in accordance with certain resolutions previously taken. By these it was declared that the old standard should be kept up, that milled coin should alone be used, that the loss should fall on the nation, not on individuals, and that the 4th of May following should be the last day on which hammered coin should be allowed to be used. The advantage of the good understanding between the Government and the Bank now became evident. To meet the expense of the new coinage, £1,200,000 was wanted. The Bank advanced it without difficulty on the security of a window tax, which took the place of the much hated hearth tax, and which lasted on almost to our own time. At last the critical day, the 4th of May, drew near. Fortunately the country was in an enthusiastic mood. Two great Jacobite plots, closely connected, which had been concocted during the previous summer, had been discovered. These were Berwick's plot for a general insurrection of the Jacobites and for an invasion from France; and a plot concocted at St. Germains, intrusted to Barclay, for the