Legal, judicial, and administrative abuses had thus received their share of amendment; but it is scarcely too much to say that all the reforms in these directions would have proved useless, but for the steps taken to check financial disaster. That commerce and industry should have sunk to a low ebb was the inevitable corollary of a foreign and civil war, but still more evil in its influence had been the steady depreciation of the coinage. Not only had the five royal mints turned out bad metal to supply Henry IV. with the money which he squandered so lavishly, but his very monopoly of coining rights had been squandered too, or disputed by rebellious subjects. By the end of his reign the five mints had grown into one hundred and fifty, and the _reals_ and _blancas_ produced by private furnaces had descended to a mere fraction of their former value. The decay of industry and the worthless coinage combined to inflate prices extravagantly, with the result that men of moderate means were ruined, and the distrust increased till no one would accept the current issues either in payment of debts or in return for goods. Such was the state of perdition into which the kingdom had fallen [says a contemporary writer], that those who travelled by the highways could not satisfy their hunger either for good money or for bad; nor was there any price at which those who laboured in the fields were willing to sell. A primitive system of barter had sprung up when, in the first year of their reign, Ferdinand and Isabel once more established the monopoly of the royal mints, and fixed a legal standard to which the coinage must approximate. These reforms were absolutely necessary to restore public confidence, but they involved a drain on the treasury which it was impossible to satisfy by ordinary means. We have seen already that in 1475 the sovereigns had recourse to a loan raised on the ecclesiastical plate, but it was an expedient that would not bear repetition, even if the Queen had not regarded the repayment of the original sum as her most sacred duty. Some other way must be found that would not threaten the property of the Church, if it was to find approval in her eyes. The deputies assembled at Toledo shook their heads gloomily over the suggestion of increased taxation. They represented the _pecheros_, or taxed classes, and knew that the little that could be raised by this method would slip in and out of the treasury as through a sieve. Taxation might prove a momentary makeshift, but in the exhausted state of the country it could offer no permanent solution of the problem.