To regard this question from a theoretic and international point of view, to the exclusion of any regard for the separate national interests of France, is a sheer absurdity. It mattered little or nothing to France that by unloading the stores of silver she happened to possess at the time of the gold discoveries of the Fifties she helped to steady the ratio for the world at large. It did however matter, and very much, that this process of exchange from the one metal to the other was attended with public loss, balanced only by illicit private gain, and with a disturbance of trade in every town of France through the disappearance of the smaller silver specie. Whether or not France or any other country is called upon to sacrifice herself thus--not once but every time the ratio fluctuates from below to above the legal ratio or _vice versa_--for the sake of an ideal, bimetallic, regulating, function, let common sense decide. The French monetary commission of 1867 speaks thus of the situation-- "It is well known by all that this ratio [of 1803] by the simple reason of its being fixed could not remain correct. There was quickly a premium on gold, and silver remained almost alone in circulation until near 1850. The discovery of the mines of California and Australia suddenly changed this situation by throwing into the European market a very considerable quantity of gold. By the side of this force, which tended to create a divergence from the legal ratio by lowering gold, there was another which occasioned a rise of silver. Under the influence of various circumstances, too long to enumerate, the needs of the extreme East had grown in unusual proportions, and as silver is alone in favour there, it was exported in enormous masses. There was a premium on silver to the extent of 8 per mille, and it disappeared almost completely from circulation, yielding place to gold. "Preoccupied by the situation the Government charged a commission to study the measures to be taken. Its labours are summed up in the report of M. de Bosredon (1857). After examining the system tending to preserve silver money intact by lowering the value of gold money, and conversely the system tending to the adoption of the gold standard by reducing the silver money to the state of billon, the commission did not decide between them. It confined itself, in fact, to counselling the Government to a transitory step--the raising of the export duties on silver.... The exportation of silver, therefore, continued; and if the disappearance of 5-franc pieces was not remarked, because they were replaced by gold, it was not the same with the scarcity of pieces of a smaller value employed in petty payments.