The attempt which was made by a commercial conference at Hamburg, at the time of the meeting of the Vienna Conference, to secure the introduction by the Hamburg Bank of a gold instead of a silver _valuta_, remained equally ineffectual. As far as concerns the establishment of a simple and single monetary system for Germany was concerned, this Vienna Convention, the last great convention which Germany saw previous to the reconstruction of her system in 1871, was as futile as that of Dresden in 1838, or as all the conventions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries previously. The consciousness of the need of such simplification and unification, however, became thereby only the more apparent. Four years later the first German Handelstag, which met in May 1861 at Heidelberg, turned its first and special attention to the erection of some common currency system. The recommendation which it finally concluded upon was the adoption of the _Drittelthaler_ as the unit mark, with a decimal subdivision. Four years later the third Handelstag, which met at Frankfort (September 1865), confirmed the resolution, with the additional proposition of the minting of a gold piece identical with the 20-franc piece, the value of which should be regulated from time to time; the scheme being, therefore, as before, that of a silver standard, with gold as trade money. The fourth Handelstag met at Berlin in October 1868, and again the matter was most seriously discussed. With the single exception of the Berlin members, all the deputies declared for the adoption of the gold standard. As, in the preceding year, Austria had withdrawn from the German Monetary Union of 1857, she no longer stood in the way of this proposition, and the erection of the North German Union distinctly favoured the project. In June 1870 the Bundesrath of the North German Union resolved upon a reform and unification of the paper money, as preparatory to a complete currency reform, and in the same month the Chancellor of the North German Union had decided to call a Mint Convention. The outbreak of the Franco-German War immediately afterwards put a short stop to the proposal. A long train of preparation had thus been laid, and there can be little doubt as to what the ultimate direction of German monetary legislation would have been, even without the war, and the consequent erection of the Empire. That the latter event, however, enormously facilitated the process cannot for a moment be questioned. [Sidenote: GERMANY: NEW IMPERIAL SYSTEM, 1871]