s a market were generally known and esteemed." (Adam Smith,
_Wealth of Nations_, Book I, chap, IV.)

From the time of Charlemagne among the French, and from that of
William the Conqueror among the English [wrote Adam Smith in 1776],
the proportion between the pound, the shilling and the penny, seems
to have been uniformly the same as at present, though the value of
each has been very different; for in every country of the world, I
believe, the avarice and injustice of princes and sovereign states,
abusing the confidence of their subjects, have by degrees
diminished the real quantity of metal which had been originally
contained in their coins. The Roman as, in the latter ages of the
republic, was reduced to the twenty-fourth part of its original
value, and, instead of weighing a pound, came to weigh only half an
ounce. The English pound and penny contain at present about a third
only; the Scots pound and penny about a thirty-sixth; and the
French pound and penny about a sixty-sixth part of their original
value. By means of those operations, the princes and sovereign
states which performed them were enabled, in appearance, to pay
their debts and fulfil their engagements with a smaller quantity of
silver than would otherwise have been requisite. It was indeed in
appearance only; for their creditors were really defrauded of a
part of what was due to them. All other debtors in the state were
allowed the same privilege, and might pay with the same nominal sum
of the new and debased coin whatever they had borrowed in the old.
Such operations, therefore, have always proved favourable to the
debtor, and ruinous to the creditor, and have sometimes produced a
greater and more universal revolution in the fortunes of private
persons, than could have been occasioned by a very great public
calamity.[2]

[2] _Wealth of Nations_, Book I, chap. IV.

John Stuart Mill follows his master in exposing and denouncing what he
calls this "least covert of all forms of knavery which consists in
calling a shilling a pound." But the opinions of Mill, the saint of
rationalism, deserve and demand citation as they bring us directly to
our subject. He writes:

When gold and silver had become virtually a medium of exchange, by
becoming the things for which people generally sold, and with which
they generally bought, what