Governments found it their interest to take the operation into their own hands, and to interdict all coining by private persons; indeed, their guarantee was often the only one which would have been relied on, a reliance however which very often it ill deserved; profligate governments having until a very modern period seldom scrupled, for the sake of robbing their creditors, to confer on all other debtors a licence to rob theirs, by the shallow and impudent artifice of lowering the standard; that least covert of all modes of knavery, which consists in calling a shilling a pound, that a debt of a hundred pounds may be cancelled by the payment of a hundred shillings. It would have been as simple a plan, and would have answered just as well, to have enacted that "a hundred" should always be interpreted to mean five, which would have effected the same reduction in all pecuniary contracts, and would not have been at all more shameless. Such strokes of policy have not wholly ceased to be recommended, but they have ceased to be practised, except occasionally through the medium of paper money, in which case the character of the transaction, from the greater obscurity of the subject is a little less barefaced.[3] [3] Mill, _Political Economy_, Book III, chap. VII. A few illustrations from the past may help us to a critical contemplation of the present monetary conditions on the continent of Europe, which constitute fraud and robbery on the most wholesale scale ever practised by governments (with the style and title of democracies!) upon the miserable victims, called citizens, and supposed to be endowed with the blessings of self-determination. Those who believe that war, if not a divine institution, is at least an inevitable feature of human society may plead in extenuation of this species of fraud that it is usually the last desperate resource of a government which has pledged all its taxes and credit for war or armaments. I remember reading in the Roman historian Sallust of a financial crisis which was ended by debts contracted in silver being paid off in copper--_argentum ære solutum est_. A few years before Adam Smith wrote his chapter on money, Frederick the Great, during the Seven Years' War, resorted to the Jew, Ephraim, who coined tin silver: Outside noble, inside slim, Outside Frederick, inside Ephraim. But Frederick, wiser and more honest than our European belligerents, made it his first care after the peace to restore an honest silver coinage. A lively example from English, or rather Irish, history is supplied by Macaulay and belongs to the year 1689. It is one of the incidents in James the Second's brief and luckless government of Ireland: