It has been already shown that this action of the government of the Netherlands has a twofold aspect. From one side it expresses and regulates the natural flow and ebb of commerce, just as exchange rates and bullion remittances do to-day. And in this sense it was perfectly normal, healthy, and sound, more especially in so far as it provided for the gradual drawing away overplus metal to the East. But the Governments of Europe were yet under the spell of the delusion as to a balance of trade payable in gold--that delusion which was, later, dignified in history by the name of the mercantile theory. Nor had they yet lost the traces of that mediæval craft and lawlessness which rose from, and prompted to, the mere desire of robbing or pilfering their neighbour's store of precious metal as the first act of self-defence. Further than this the monetary system of Europe--unconsciously bimetallic and with an appalling variety of ratio prevalent at the same moment in different places--lay open, helpless and defenceless, and inviting to the bullionist, financier, or arbitragist. In so far as this element of national greed and dishonesty, or private and unprincipled gain, entered into the legislative enactments of the Netherlands, it condemns them as mercenary, and the monetary straits or tightness, not to say crisis and panic which ensued, as unnecessary and therefore in the highest degree lamentable. [Sidenote: SIXTEENTH-CENTURY ARBITRAGE] In a blind way the age saw what was going on behind the financier's screen, however little it understood the theory of it. In many a sixteenth-century document, preserved among the State papers in the Record Office at London, abuse is piled on the Netherlands for their practices in enticing away the coin of the realm. One of the correspondents of the Privy Council in the days of Elizabeth, 1575, writes thus from the Netherlands: "The Low Country merchants return great stores of money hither by exchanges, and by the proceeds, as the exchange may serve for their purposes, they send away her majesty's coin and bullion into the Low Countries in great quantities, and the rather by reason of the Hollanders trading with the East, by which means the realm will be secretly robbed, if it be not prevented." Twenty years later the whole subject was again gone into, for the fiftieth time, for the advice of the English Privy Council, and it was shown how "foreign exchangers contrived, by arranging a rise or fall in particular monies, to undervalue English monies, and draw them out of the kingdom. Prevention has been vainly attempted by Acts of Parliament, by sending over Sir Thomas Gresham to the Low Countries to complain, and by establishing the office of exchanger, which was discontinued as injurious to the State. A bank was proposed, but the Queen had not to spare the £100,000 needed to start it. It is now proposed to settle the exchange at 10 or 12 per cent., to be fixed yearly, according to the state of affairs, 20 per cent.