It was only gradually that in its totality of coins the French monetary system was made to conform to the metric system thus established. The old gold coins of 12, 24, and 48 livres were not suppressed until June 1829, the actual extinction of billon money was only accomplished in 1845, and the recoinage of the inferior monies in 1852-56. But such are mere matters of detail and apart from the subject. The experience of France under this new régime is, therefore, in no wise different _in kind_ from such experience as has been described for the preceding centuries. It is not until the broaching of a bimetallic theory as such, and until the expression of that theory, as a theory, in the formation of the Latin Union, that anything like a special significance attaches to the monetary system and experience of France in the nineteenth century, any more, e.g., than in the seventeenth. The main difference in the situation was not that France had changed her system, and that her experience was henceforth different and of different signification, but that England had changed hers, and that the brunt of the fluctuations of the precious metals about a fixed ratio was left to be borne by a smaller area. The influence and the instance is, therefore, more telling in degree, but in no way different in kind. The second idea which is commonly entertained with regard to the action of France during this later period, viz. that her action secured for the world at large a fixed and steady ratio, is equally--indeed, still more--fallacious. At no point of time during the present century has the actual market ratio, dependent on the commercial value of silver, corresponded with the French ratio of 15-1/2, and at no point of time has France been free from the disastrous influence of that want of correspondence between the legal and the commercial ratio. The opposite notion, which prevails and finds expression in the ephemeral bimetallic literature of to-day, is simply due to ignorance. From 1815 England has been withdrawn from this action of a bimetallic law, and the modern insular pamphleteer has before his eyes no sign of its workings in his own country. He therefore assumes an universality of such experience, and attributes it to the French legislative ratio. It is in no polemic spirit, but simply in the interest of science that this particular misapplication of history to the squaring of a theory is to be branded. The plainest facts of history are thereby absolutely misrepresented, and the assumption of cause and effect is so far from being true that the repose of the English currency history in the nineteenth century is to be attributed to the _absence_ of a bimetallic system; to its despite rather than its presence and influence. To instance only by France for the moment. [Sidenote: FRANCE: COURSE OF THE RATIO]