+---------+------------+--------++---------+------------+--------+ | | | Up to 1878 this table is derived from Soetbeer, | | _Edelmetall-Produktion_, pp. 130-2. | | From 1878-1890 I have calculated simply in accordance with | | Soetbeer's method. | | | | The figures for 1891-3 are taken from the United States Mint | | Report, 1893, already referred to, p. 251. In the table there | | printed the director of the Mint gives slightly different | | figures for several years from 1872 onwards. | +----------------------------------------------------------------+ As far as the conditions of production of the precious metals are concerned, and the connection between those conditions and the ratio, there is historic and understandable continuity between the period already passed in review and modern times. In the method of expressing that ratio, however, there is a remarkable difference. [Sidenote: EVOLUTION OF THE MODERN SYSTEM] With the close of the seventeenth century the advantage of the process of altering the denomination of the coinage, of diminishing the content and reducing the standard of fineness, began to be impugned on theoretic grounds, and in the course of the eighteenth century that process itself fell into disuse. Since that time no Mint or legislative change such as we have hitherto described was made on the expressed value or content of any European coinage. Bearing in mind the twofold importance which was attached to that process of legislative guarding of the currency, this change must be regarded as of vital import. The legislator, from the middle of the fourteenth century, had attempted two things by this mechanism--(1) to follow the general rise of prices, and meet it by reducing the contents of the coins in such proportion as he thought fit; (2) to prevent any disastrous outflow of the precious metals by altering the ratio. The control of the Mint rates of metal-purchase and metal-coinage was, therefore, a matter of importance financially and politically to the nation, and economically to international commerce. In just such measure, therefore, was the entire ceasing of this State control of the mechanism of international exchange and currency a matter of almost incalculable significance in the history of the European monetary system. In the domain of finance it effected a revolution as signal as that produced in the relations of labour to capital by the disuse of the old labour laws. The ceasing of the artificial arbitrary Mint rates made way for a naturally determined or _commercial_ ratio, and the regulation of the international flow of the precious metals was left to the oscillation of trade balances, and to the action of interest rates and discount.