For instance, the Government wants a hundred tons of wheat to feed soldiers with, and the price of wheat in gold at that moment is Ten Sovereigns a ton. It says to a merchant, “If you will give me a hundred tons of wheat, I will give you a thousand sovereigns.” But when it comes to paying the thousand sovereigns, instead of giving a thousand coins with 123 grains of gold in each, it strikes a baser coin with only a hundred or less than a hundred grains in each, and pays the merchant with these. It is a simple form of cheating and always effective, because the merchant thinks the sovereign is genuine. Only when these bad sovereigns get into circulation they naturally find their level in gold; for people begin to test them, and find that they have not got as much gold in them as they pretend to have. Then, of course, prices as measured in this new base coin rise. If the Government wants to buy another hundred tons of wheat it must offer more than a thousand of the base coins; it must offer, say, thirteen hundred of them. But again it is tempted to put even less gold into the coins with which it pays for the second lot of wheat, and so the coin gets baser and baser, until at last, perhaps, a sovereign will not really be worth half what it pretends to be. Governments in the past have done this over and over again, but it was not until our time that the worst form of debasing the coinage came in. It came in as a result of the Great War, and we are all suffering from it to-day. This last and worst form of debasing coinage worked, not through cheating about the metal, but through a trick played with paper money.