Remedies suggested——Rosa’s law fixing the value of paper money and establishing a _Caisse de Conversion_——Opposition to this law—— Its beneficent effect upon agriculture and stock-raising, which had especial need of a stable medium of exchange——Reserve fund created with a view to converting paper money; its vicissitudes in the past and its present constitution——The present monetary situation. In the financial history of the nations there are few examples of countries in which the phenomenon of two standards of currency has manifested itself so persistently and for so long a period as in the Argentine Republic. This is one of the gloomiest pages of its past, on which are recorded all the errors of its rulers, all the abuses of speculation, and all the faults of administration whose cost the present generation has been paying since the opening of the twentieth century. Since the 27th of May 1820, the date on which the Junta of Representatives authorised a gradual issue of paper money, and another issue of redeemable and endorsable notes, the latter to be applied to the payment of debts contracted in the name of all the Provinces during the previous Administrations; since 1820, we were saying, until the present time, there have been few years indeed during which the Republic has not been under the empire of a double currency.[107] [Footnote 107: In 1820 the issue of paper money was 40,000 piastres per month, and that of the notes was the same.] Our paper money, says an Argentine publicist, originated in an issue of 290,000 piastres by the _Banque d’Escompte_, created in virtue of a law of the Province of Buenos Ayres, dated the 22nd of June 1822. Four years later, when on the 20th of January 1826 the Discount Bank was transformed into the National Bank, the issue amounted to $2,694,856. When the National Bank was in turn converted into the Mint, eleven years later——that is, on the 1st of January 1837——the issue had already amounted to $15,283,540. Seventeen years later, when the Mint was transformed into the Provincial Bank (1st January 1854), the issue amounted to $203,915,206. During the twenty-seven years which elapsed between the creation of this bank and the passing of the monetary law of 1881, the successive issues of National and Provincial Governments had increased the mass of inconvertible paper to the sum of $882,071,156. It was then, with gold at 2500 per cent., that the Government began to recall all this mass of paper, replacing it by another issue, of which the one piastre notes exchanged against 25, or a piastre’s worth of the issue which was destined to disappear. This operation, which at a blow reduced the paper currency to a twenty-fifth part of its original amount, also brought gold to par.[108] [Footnote 108: See _Las vicisitudes de nuestra moneda jiduciaria en los ultimos 65 años_ (1826-1890), by F. Latzina.]