"Being informed of the obstruction to retail commerce by complaints carried before the Senate, and instructed by the example of Switzerland, which had in 1860 reduced the standard of its divisional money, the Minister of Finance appointed a commission, 1861, to study the remedy to be applied to the evil. This commission counselled the reduction of the standard of pieces of less than 5-francs to .834 fine. It did this in complete knowledge of the cause, fully recognising that in so doing the monetary unity of silver, characteristic of our system, would be thereby broken, at anyrate for its circulating form; for while the franc no longer existed in law, the 5-franc was disappearing in fact, so that the change was equivalent to the establishment of a gold standard." This advice of the commission was however, by the law of 1864, applied only to pieces of 50 or 20 centimes. The next step in the process was the formation of the Latin Union in the year following. The above-quoted commission speaks of the intentional aspect of this Union in these words: "This convention places in the front rank gold money, and reduces the pieces of silver of 2 francs and less to the _rôle_ of token money. It therefore definitely determines [_consacre_] the ascendency of the gold francs, and solves practical difficulties arising from the double standard." This was written in 1867, less than two years after the formation of the Latin Union. It is not the view which prevails among bimetallists to-day as to the purpose and intentional bearing of that Union; but it is the historic truth none the less, and it was only the complete revolution in the conditions of production of the precious metals which made itself felt from 1871, which has given the Latin Union the aspect of a theoretic concert for the maintenance of, rather than as a defence against, a bimetallic system. If silver had not fallen in 1871 the Latin Union would still be the bulwark of defence of bimetallic France against the action of bimetallic law. [Sidenote: THE LATIN UNION]