will find it upse" (that is, highly) "ecclesiastical." This question had hardly been settled before Locke had another opportunity of influencing legislation on a subject which absorbed much of his interest, and on which he had already employed his pen. Probably at no time in the history of our country has the condition of the coinage become so burning a question, or caused such wide-spread distress, as in the years immediately succeeding the Revolution. To understand the monetary difficulties occasioned by clipping the coin, it must be remembered that, at the time of which I am speaking, two kinds of silver money (if we neglect the imperfectly milled money which was executed between 1561 and 1663) were in circulation, hammered money with unmarked rims, and what was called milled money, from being made in a coining-mill, with a legend on the rim of the larger and graining on the rim of the smaller pieces. The latter kind of coins, too, had the additional advantage of being almost perfectly circular, while the shape of the former was almost always more or less irregular. The hammered money, it is plain, could be easily clipped or pared, whereas the milling was an absolute protection against this mode of fraud. Though milling, in much its present form, had been introduced into our mint in the year 1663, and then became the exclusive mode of coining, the old hammered money still continued to be legal tender; and, as the milled money was always worth its weight in silver, and the hammered money was generally current at something much above its intrinsic worth, the milled money was naturally melted down or exported abroad, leaving the hammered money in almost exclusive possession of the field. The milled money disappeared almost as fast as it was coined, and the hammered money was clipped and pared more and more, till it was often not worth half or even a third of the sum for which it passed. At Oxford, indeed, a hundred pounds' worth of the current silver money, which ought to have weighed four hundred ounces, was found to weigh only a hundred and sixteen. Every month the state of things was becoming worse and worse. The cost of commodities was constantly rising, and every payment of any amount involved endless altercations. In a bargain not only had the price of the article to be settled, but also the value of the money in which it was to be paid. A guinea, which at one place counted for only twenty-two shillings, would at another fetch thirty, and might have brought far more, had not the Government fixed that sum as the maximum at which it would be taken in the payment of taxes. Thus, all commercial transactions had become disarranged; no one knew what he was really worth, or what any commodity might cost him a few months hence. Macaulay, who has given a most graphic description of the financial condition of the country at this time, hardly exaggerates when he says, "It may be doubted whether all the