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hope I have now sufficiently pointed out, is diffused agricultural skill, and competition for business profits. This is not indeed the cause of all rent, for, as I have said, there is a famine rent, under which the landowner by familiar processes takes from the cultivator of the soil all but a bare subsistence. During the seventeenth century the English farmer had experience of a famine rent. For the last eight years, it has been renewed. The Irish farmer, who is in nine cases out of ten a labourer paid in land, has had no other experience than that of a famine rent. The Nemesis has come in both countries, and even the nineteen years lease, which the Duke of Argyll thinks the quintessence of human wisdom, gilded by the most perfect justice, is discredited. When will people learn that high prices do not make high rents, that folly may destroy what it can never recover, and that the best way to extinguish all human interest in rent is to deny that it is a matter of human institution, while it is the result of an intelligence possessed by the occupier and not by the landowner, except under peculiar circumstances, and is in no sense divine or providential?

One of the ways in which the owners of land have striven to maintain artificial rents has been, first, by starving the peasant, next by putting the cost of his necessary maintenance on other people. I have already described to you how this system was developed. It has been most disastrous to those who devised and carried it out. I don't know whether the farmer and landowner will ever find out that low wages do not mean cheap labour; but it is a common-place even with economists of the stupid school, and a truth which they have been able to grasp, for they learnt so much from Adam Smith. But that their misery was to be an ever-increasing cause of rent, was left for the genius of a London stockbroker to enunciate, for the economists and country gentlemen to accept, and to be refuted by facts. More than twenty years ago I pointed out the nature of the problem and its inevitable solution. I suffered the ordinary fate of those who are more far-sighted than the people among whom they live-no great feat here. I might perhaps, if time permitted, discuss with you what must be the rent of the future, for that of the past is vanishing, and for reasons which you might gather, and probably will, from what I have said. Or I might fortify myself with the example of a great man of my youth, the late Sir

Robert Peel, and decline to commit myself to a prediction and a remedy till I am called in. This, however, is perfectly certainthe landowners of the eighteenth century made the British farmer the best agriculturist in the world; the landowners of the nineteenth have beggared him.

METALLIC CURRENCIES.

Early English money-The mark and the pound-Changes in the weight of the penny-Silver produced in England-The King's Exchanger-The ratios of silver and gold-Causes affecting these ratios-Bimetallism—Gresham's Law-Payments made by weight not by tale-Reasons proving this-The debasement by Henry VIII. -The foreign exchanges―The recoinage in 1696—The suspension of cash payments-Seigniorages on coins-The efficiency of the currency-Currency kept for two objects, internal and foreign

trade.

THE subject on which I am to lecture to-day is rather technical. It can only be understood when some figures are mastered, and there are some figures, as I shall show in the course of what I have to say, which would be wholly deceptive, if they were not explained away. The right apprehension of what the English currency was is absolutely essential towards the interpretation of money values in the economical history of England, and the interpretation of that economical history gives meaning and vitality to constitutional and political events, transforming them from disconnected and unrelated annals into a cohesive and continuous vitality. I hope that the laborious antiquaries who dig out what they call the facts of the English constitution, and edit the opinions which they discover, will take no offence at what I say. Their work has a high value, because it is the collection of materials, and without materials, no man, except a metaphysician, can build. But there is really nothing constructive in constitutional and political history. The proof lies in the fact that the

most ingenious theories are liable to destructive criticism, even when propounded by men of real genius.

Those Teutonic nations which were never brought under the direct influence of the Roman administration had a unit of

money which they called the mark. Those parts of Western Europe which were brought under the direct administration of Rome had a unit which they called the pound, livre, lire. Sometimes, as in England, the two systems were used in calculations, and in early times quantities were expressed in marks almost as frequently as they were in pounds. From a very early date the mark was reckoned at two-thirds of the pound. Neither the pound or the mark was ever coined. They were simply money of account. Moreover, the only currency employed in circulation for a long time was silver, and in many countries silver remained the only currency till very recently. In some communities, gold has been substituted for silver. In some, paper has taken the place of silver. In England, the pound of silver, called the Tower or Saxon pound, contained 5,400 grains. In 1527, Henry VIII substituted the Troy for the Tower pound, containing 5,760 grains. The penny then contained 22 grains of the older, 24 grains of the later pound. The fineness of the standard was, in theory, 111 pure silver and 9 alloy; and the king's officers at the exchequer took care that the money paid should be up to the standard of fineness, as we learn from that very ancient financial treatise "The Dialogue on the Exchequer," first printed by Madox.

Nobody knows in what nation or in what place, the capital invention of the coin was made-whether it was in Greece, or Sicily, or Italy, where, by the way, the ancient currency was copper, a metal more frequently found native in a pure state than any, excepting gold. We know that there were countries far advanced in civilization which had no coins. There were none in Egypt, in Assyria, in Babylonia, in the old Phoenician colonies; for coins are sure to be lost now and then, and are exceedingly indestructible. None have been found in the ruins of these countries, and yet it appears, from recent research, that Babylonia had an elaborate system of banking, and all the machinery of transferring balances from one account to another. In the same way, though

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there is a small currency in China, there is no silver coinage; for it is said that Mexican dollars, which serve, or did serve, to liquidate balances, are melted into ingots when they get into the native merchants' hands, these ingots being stamped with the trade mark of the merchant who casts and re-issues them. Such, probably, were the means by which exchanges were made in early times, and among those nations which never adopted a money currency. Some measure of value is needful for business of a rudimentary kind, but we see, from the example of these ancient peoples, that great progress can be made without coined money.

I need not trouble you with the common-places which you will find in all books on political economy, as to the motives which have induced nations to adopt the use of gold and silver coins. The economists have interpreted these functions with great precision and clearness. It is not wonderful that they have, for many of them who have written on the subject have been engaged in what is called the money market, or have been familiar with those who have been so engaged. I have thought it my duty to speak with exceeding plainness about the Ricardian theory of rent, because I hold it to be so exceedingly incorrect, and so transcendently mischievous, since it encourages men to hope for impossibilities. But on money and banking, on currency questions generally, and especially on the most abstruse of them, Ricardo's authority is of the highest character. Here he was in his element, for he was an exceedingly acute stock-jobber, in the days when a prosperous stock-jobber was almost a strategist, as you may learn, if you like, from biographies about successful people in this calling. Rude and comparatively savage races imitated currencies. I know nothing more ingenious and more conclusive than the manner in which Mr. Evans, the numismatologist, has traced the British gold coinage, which is tolerably abundant in collections, to the imitation of a Macedonian stater of one of the later Temenid kings.

If you take up books in which the English currency is treated, you will find the following statement of . facts. The original standard of weight in the silver penny may be taken at 3. In 1299, Edward I. reduced it to 2.871; in 1344 Edward III. reduced it to 2-622, in 1846 to 2.583, and in 1353 to 2.325. In 1412,