"It is, to our conception, less a theory than the result of the primitive inability of the legislators to combine together the two precious metals otherwise than by way of an unlimited concurrence--metals, both of which are destined to enter into the monetary system, but which recent legislators have learned to co-ordinate by leaving the unlimited function to gold alone and reducing silver to the rôle of divisional money. From 1857 the French Government has studied the question, and it may be stated that since that date the principle of the gold standard has won increasing favour through our several administrations." Then follows an account of the monetary history of France during the period, as in brief résumé already given. "If," the preamble continues, "from 1874, certain precautions had not been taken to arrest the effects of that grave perturbation in the ratio, France and her monetary allies would have seen their monetary circulation invaded by silver and correspondingly drained of gold." Hence the conventions of 1874-75-76, limiting the mintings of the members of the Latin Union, although, "according to us, the fall of silver in 1875 prescribed a complete cessation even for that year rather than a simple limitation." Germany. Until the unification of Germany in our own days, and the adoption of the present imperial currency system, German monetary history reproduces perpetually all the elements of that mediæval system, bimetallic in fact though not theoretically so conceived, which England flung away in 1816, and from the toils of which France has not as yet completely emerged. As safeguards against the evils of that system which she had felt with such bitter experience, and which had culminated in the crisis closing the Thirty Years' War, Germany could only feebly employ the mechanism of ineffectual Mint conventions. For a century she persevered in the effort to establish a common standard and Mint system, but in vain. The attempt had to be abandoned, and the reeling system left to its own process of disintegration; and when at last the events of 1871 came to give her unity in her coinage, as well as political life, there were not less than nine distinct and independent coinage systems in existence. Hardly had the crisis of the Thirty Years' War passed out of mind before again the currency system had begun to work its baneful effects. [Sidenote: GERMANY: THE ZINNAISCHE STANDARD]