ad shillings. Whether Whigs or Tories,
Protestants or Papists were uppermost, the grazier drove his beasts to
market, the grocer weighed out his currants, the draper measured out his
broadcloth, the hum of buyers and sellers was as loud as ever in the
towns; the cream overflowed the pails of Cheshire; the apple juice foamed
in the presses of Herefordshire; the piles of crockery glowed in the
furnaces of the Trent, and the barrows of coal rolled fast along the
timber railways of the Tyne. But when the great instrument of exchange
became thoroughly deranged all trade and all industry were smitten as
with a palsy. Nothing could be purchased without a dispute. Over every
counter there was wrangling from morning to night. The employer and his
workmen had a quarrel as regularly as Saturday night came round. On a
fair day or a market day the clamours, the disputes, the reproaches, the
taunts, the curses, were incessant. No merchant would contract to
deliver goods without making some stipulation about the quality of the
coin in which he was to be paid. The price of the necessaries of life,
of shoes, of ale, of oatmeal, rose fast. The bit of metal called a
shilling the labourer found would not go so far as sixpence. One day
Tonson sends forty brass shillings to Dryden, to say nothing of clipped
money. The great poet sends them all back and demands in their place
good guineas. "I expect," he says, "good silver, not such as I had
formerly." Meanwhile, at every session of the Old Bailey the most
terrible example of coiners and clippers was made. Hurdles, with four,
five, six wretches convicted of counterfeiting or mutilating the money of
the realm, were dragged month after month up Holborn Hill.' But I cannot
copy the whole chapter, wonderful as the writing is. Suffice it to say
that before the clippers could be rooted out, and confidence restored
between buyer and seller, the greatest statesmen, the greatest
financiers, and the greatest philosophers were all at their wits' end.
Kings' speeches, cabinet councils, bills of Parliament, and showers of
pamphlets were all full in those days of the clipper and the coiner. All
John Locke's great intellect came short of grappling successfully with
the terrible crisis the clipper of the coin had brought upon England.
Carry all that, then, over into the life of personal religion, after the
manner of our Lord's parables, and after the manner of the _Pilgrim's
Progress_ and the