Dudley North
had recommended, that the King should by proclamation fix a near day
after which the hammered money should in all payments pass only by
weight. The advantages of this plan were doubtless great and obvious. It
was most simple, and, at the same time, most efficient. What searching,
fining, branding, hanging, burning, had failed to do would be done in an
instant. The clipping of the hammered pieces, the melting of the milled
pieces would cease. Great quantities of good coin would come forth from
secret drawers and from behind the panels of wainscots. The mutilated
silver would gradually flow into the mint, and would come forth again in
a form which would make mutilation impossible. In a short time the
whole currency of the realm would be in a sound state, and, during the
progress of this great change, there would never at any moment be any
scarcity of money.

These were weighty considerations; and to the joint authority of North
and Locke on such a question great respect is due. Yet it must be owned
that their plan was open to one serious objection, which did not indeed
altogether escape their notice, but of which they seem to have thought
too lightly. The restoration of the currency was a benefit to the whole
community. On what principle then was the expense of restoring the
currency to be borne by a part of the community? It was most desirable
doubtless that the words pound and shilling should again have a fixed
signification, that every man should know what his contracts meant and
what his property was worth. But was it just to attain this excellent
end by means of which the effect would be that every farmer who had
put by a hundred pounds to pay his rent, every trader who had scraped
together a hundred pounds to meet his acceptances, would find his
hundred pounds reduced in a moment to fifty or sixty? It was not
the fault of such a farmer or of such a trader that his crowns and
halfcrowns were not of full weight. The government itself was to blame.
The evil which the State had caused the State was bound to repair, and
it would evidently have been wrong to throw the charge of the reparation
on a particular class, merely because that class was so situated that
it could conveniently be pillaged. It would have been as reasonable to
require the timber merchants to bear the whole cost of fitting out the
Channel fleet, or the gunsmiths to bear the whole cost of supplying arms
to the regiments in Flanders, as to