The course of the actual or market ratio has been already stated in the table (_supra_, pp. 157-59). In the graphic representation of this (_opposite_) the legal ratio of 15-1/2 is represented by the fixed line _x.y._, the actual ratio by the fluctuating black line _z_. At no point do these lines coincide. After three years of fluctuations, 1803-06, now above and now below, the ratio sinks persistently below for seven years, 1807-13, touching the lowest point (a ratio of 16.24) in 1813. For the succeeding five or six years, 1813-19, the ratio was as consistently above the legal rate, though with less violence and width of divergence. From the latter year, 1819, up to 1850, its course was undeviatingly below 15-1/2, then from 1851-67--the period, i.e., of the great gold outputs of Australia and America--as undeviatingly above. From the last-named date until the close of the bimetallic system in France, and, indeed, up to our own days, the course of the commercial ratio has been again unbrokenly below the 15-1/2 ratio, and, as is too well known, with an ever-increasing enormity of divergence. So much for the claim that the French law has dowered the world with a steady ratio. _Secondly_, what has been the influence of this divergence of the commercial from the legal ratio upon France's store of precious metals? It has been exactly similar in effect and force with that wielded by similar trains of event and circumstance, in the monetary history of France during the four preceding centuries. The exact official figures of the import and export of gold and silver are not obtainable before 1822, and in a continuous stream not before 1830 (separably for the two metals, that is to say).[15] [Sidenote: FRANCE: BIMETALLIC EXPERIENCE, 1803-75]