service for four years, during this period to wear, according to custom, a fool's cap, and to allow himself to be punished and beaten when inexpert or in the wrong; then at last he was admitted to the business of coining, and entered as an associate in the brotherhood of Imperial coiners. But these strict regulations, which were again confirmed to the brotherhood by the Emperor Maximilian II., in 1571, had even then ceased to have the effect of making the corporation honourable and upright. Equally inefficient were the attempts at control, by the decisions of the Imperial Diet and the Sovereigns. At the inspection of every piece of coin the master of the mint had with him a warden, who proved the texture and weight of the coin. The ten Circles of the Empire held yearly approbation days, in order, mutually, to compare their coin and to reject the bad; every Circle was to be represented by a warden-general; for every Circle an appointed number of mints were established, in which the lesser rulers were to have their money specially coined: but all these regulations were only imperfectly carried out. There were undoubtedly some Sovereigns and mint-masters then in the country who were faithful, but they were few in number; and generally a mint-master, who was considered capable by a German Circle, and worked in a legal mint, was concerned in many strange practices. It was difficult to exercise control over these imperfect coining proceedings; the temptations were great, and morality in general much lower than now. From the Sovereign down to the understrapper and Jewish purveyor, every one concerned in coining deceived the other. The Sovereign allowed the master of the mint for a series of years to work and become rich; he perhaps permitted in silence the coin of the country to be debased, in order at the right moment to proceed against the guilty, from whom then he squeezed out by pressure, like a sponge, all that they had sucked up for many years drop by drop. It did not avail them that they had long quitted the service, for after many years greedy justice would reach them: but the mint-master, who was not in the convenient position of the lion, to be able to secure his booty by a single stroke of the paw, was in the habit of industriously overreaching his masters, the purveyors, nay even his cashiers, the associates, and the apprentices, not to mention the public. The other assistants did no better; every man's hand was against the other, and the curse, which according to the proverb lies on the gold of the German dwarf, appears in the seventeenth century to have depraved all who transmuted the shining metal into money. The common method of transacting the business was as follows.