Lombard Street, and you must pay from £6 to £10, and sometimes more, to have £100 in gold for silver. For who will take gold to the Tower to be coined, and lose 2s. in 20s. of what they can make by transporting it? We have more English gold in Amsterdam than you have (in England), all sent within those twenty years, and great quantities of English silver have weekly come over in pinks and Dutch men-of-war for years, to the value of many hundred thousands of pounds, in return for coin. I wondered at first how the merchants transported all the weighty and culled English money into Holland, until one of the bankers told me. I would have you inquire it and prevent it, for it is a most pernicious thing. It is the goldsmiths, especially those in Lombard Street, which are the greatest merchants, and London cashiers, and who will receive any man's money for nothing, and pay it for them the same or next day, and meantime keep people in their upper rooms to cull and weigh all they receive, and melt down the weighty, and transport it to foreign parts, sometimes without melting, and keep banks for all the principal coin in Christendom in their shops." The succeeding years of the Commonwealth saw little change in the situation. In 1659 and 1660 the Council was still anxiously debating the question of the transport of bullion and coin. But this chain of phenomena refers to the third period in this history, and are to be treated of in that connection. [Sidenote: CLOSE OF THE SECOND PERIOD: RÉSUMÉ] In broadest and hastiest résumé, and this by way of justification of the length to which this chapter has been drawn out, the influence of American gold and silver makes itself perceptible in 1520. For forty years a level and equal advance in each of the precious metals and in prices records itself, then the relative and absolute production of silver increases enormously over that of gold, and the ratio is disturbed. The inequality of the rate at which this change of ratio spreads to successive countries, and is adopted in their various Mint regulations, is the bullionist's or exchanger's opportunity, and the disastrous effect of their activity results in the crisis of 1570 in France, and 1622 in England and Germany. Properly speaking there has been no subsequent crisis in European history fitly comparable with the latter of these. If at all, there is only one comparison possible, and that is the currency situation in which the monetary world is at this moment, or which has come upon it since 1850--a period of bullion inflation in which silver has, finally as yet, outweighed gold, to the violent disturbance of the ratio. But, as will be seen, the other conditions of the comparison are not reducible to, or expressible in, similar terms, and so far the legitimate deduction fails. None the less, the currency history of Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has a vital didactic importance. FOOTNOTES: