the Coins struck in one country were to receive legal currency in another; and this interchangeability of Coins was the main object of the treaty.

This general object may have implied the purpose, or carried with it the result, that a certain metal or certain metals should become or remain material of Coinage in the contracting countries, and may have included the obligation of each party to maintain by appropriate laws the LegalTender character of such coined metal.

But it was the coining and not the metal: it was the subdivision and the stamping of the material, and not the material itself, that offered the motive of the contract.

Until the middle of this century, it appears to have been taken for granted, perhaps unconsciously, but in any case by general consent, that the two metals would remain Money; that they would retain an international currency as material for Money sufficient to guarantee their general status. Gold might be excluded here from Legal-Tender, and there Silver might be ostracized, but there was no combined effort to exclude Silver, and the nations which would not admit Gold as Legal-Tender furthered its use as a trade Coin.

On the other hand, the advocates of the policy adopted by Congress dealt with the material, not with the stamping of its subdivisions.

The object of this policy would be fully met by a Treaty which should merely guarantee the equality of the metals before the law. Under such a Treaty the contracting parties might each retain undisturbed their national Coins; their mutual engagement would relate merely to the use of the two metals as full Legal-Tender at the same ratio. This implies of course that in making such Coins, uniform freedom should be granted to the private individual to have such metal coined and that the same charge, or absence of charge, for Coinage, should obtain in the contracting nations, and that at the same time full Legal-Tender power should be appropriately secured by each contracting country to its own Coins thus struck.

An examination of the History of the Coinage Confederations, hereafter mentioned, will reveal that their disadvantages or deficiencies arose either, 1st, from this extra-national legal currency of Coins, which was their primary object; or, 2d (when they contemplated the concur rent use of the two metals), from an extra-federal demand for Gold at a Silver price higher than that assigned to the metal in the federal Coinage System.

These disadvantages which inhered in all European Monetary Unions actually formed are believed to be excluded from that which the United States has proposed to the nations for discussion. It is not essential, nor is it an important practical object of this policy that extra-national legal currency of Coins should be included in the contract, while the union contemplated is so large that, so far as probabilities can be calcu lated, its tranquillity could not, under any circumstances which this generation is warranted in anticipating, be disturbed by an extra-federal demand for Gold.

LIST OF TREATIES.

GERMAN STATES.

Coinage Union of the Four Electors of the Rhine, fifteenth century. Coinage and Customs Union of the same, seventeenth century. Coinage "Correspondenz" of the various Districts of the Empire, sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries.

Coinage Agreement (Recess) of Zinna, 1667; Electors of Saxony; Electors of Brandenburg; joined by the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg. Coinage Union of Leipzig, 1690; Elector of Saxony; Elector of Brandenburg; House of Brunswick-Lüneburg.

Coinage Treaty of Vienna, September 21, 1753; Austria; Elector of Bavaria.

Coinage-Union-Treaties of Frankfort, February 22, 1765, and of Worms, January 19, 1766, of the Electors of Mainz, Treves, and the Palatinate Landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt, and Free-City Frankfort.

In some of the various treaties which established and regulated the GERMAN TRADE AND CUSTOMS UNION are to be found provisions affecting the reciprocal acceptance of coins.

COINAGE TREATY OF MUNICH, August 25, 1837. (Bavaria, Würtemberg, Baden, Hesse, Nassau, and Frankfort.) COINAGE TREATY OF DRESDEN, July 30, 1838. (States of the German Customs Union.)

COINAGE TREATY OF MUNICH, March 27, 1845.

MONETARY CARTEL: for punishment of all crimes against the prerogative of coining and of issuing paper money. Karlsruhe, October 21, 1845. (Prussian Customs-Union); Prussian Customs-Union, February 19, 1853.

COINAGE TREATY OF VIENNA, January 24, 1857. (Formed in pursuance to Art. 9 of the Treaty of Karlsruhe, July 19, 1853, by Austria, the Principality of Lichtenstein, and the States which were parties to the Treaty of Dresden, July 30, 1838.) Austria, Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony, Hanover, Würtemberg, Baden, Electorate of Hesse, Grand Duchy of Hesse, Grand Duchy of Saxony, Oldenburg, Saxe-Meiningen, Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Saxe Altenburg, Brunswick, Nassau, Anhalt-Dessau-Köthen, Anhalt-Bernburg, Schwarzburg-Sondershausen, Schwartzburg-Rudolstadt, Lichtenstein, Waldeck and Pyrmont, Reuss older line, Reuss younger line, Schaumburg-Lippe, Lippe, Landgraviate of Hesse, The Free City of Frankfort.

THE LATIN UNION.

MONETARY TREATY OF PARIS, December 23, 1865. France, Belgium, Switzerland, and Italy. Took effect August 1, 1866. Ratified, by Italy, June 2, and July 21, 1866; by Belgium, July 21, 1866; by Switzerland, 1866; and by France.

The Accession of Greece to the Treaty took place April 10-22, 1867; of Roumania, April 14, 1867; of the States of the Church, June 18, 1866.

Supplementary Treaty of January 30, 1874. Belgium, France, Italy,
Switzerland.

Supplementary Declaration of February 5, 1875.
Supplementary Declaration of February 3, 1876.
Supplementary Declaration, 1877.

Treaty of the Renewal of the Treaty of 1865, November 5, 1878.

FRANCE AND AUSTRIA.

PRELIMINARY MONETARY TREATY OF PARIS, July 3, 1867. France and Austria.

THE SCANDINAVIAN UNION.

MONETARY TREATY OF DECEMBER 18, 1872. Sweden and Denmark. Supplementary Treaty of May 27, 1873.

Treaty of Accession of Norway, to the latter Treaty, October 16, 1875.

THE ORIGIN OF THE MONETARY UNION CALLED "LATIN,"

1865.
[Translation.]

REPORT ADDRESSED TO HIS MAJESTY THE EMPEROR BY HIS EXCELLENCY THE MINISTER OF FINANCE, CONCERNING A BILL RELATING TO THE MONETARY TREATY NEGOTIATED BETWEEN FRANCE, BELGIUM, ITALY, AND SWITZERLAND.

(Second Exhibit to No. 2375. Distribution of 14th April, 1866-Council of State, Sections of Finance and of Legislation consolidated, No. 76333. M. de Lavenay, Counsellor of State, Reporter.)

SIRE:

The attention of Your Majesty has been now for some time directed to that economic movement which is substituting Gold for Silver in the monetary system of the entire world.

For ages, the yield of Silver has been greater in value than that of gold, and this movement of production favored the maintenance of the relation of 1 to 15 established between the respective values of the two Precious Metals in the French monetary system.

Since 1846 the proportion between the values of the quantities of the two metals annually extracted from the mines has been reversed; the yield of gold has become greater than that of silver, and it has constantly, although in varying degree, preserved this superiority.

These great quantities of gold, coming, for the most part, from California and Australia, have thus rendered this metal far more abundant in the issues of coin in all the countries which admitted it, either as principal money, as, for example, England, Portugal, Brazil, the city of Bremen, or as money concurrently with silver, as did France and Italy. The abundance of gold has even caused the introduction of this

metal into the monetary system of countries which lately rejected it, as, for example, Switzerland, Belgium, and English India.

In France all large payments which, as is well known, were formerly made in sacks of 5-franc pieces, have been of late years effected in gold; and of the old 5-franc dollars almost all have been successively exported or melted down; to be replaced by coins of gold, which metal being comparatively depreciated, must, upon its exchange with Silver, give a sure profit to speculation.

Your Government, Sire, taking this course of facts into consideration, has adopted various measures in view of this situation. It has notably favored the diffusion of gold in a form convenient for the replacing of the 5-franc pieces which were disappearing; and when the exportation of Silver extended to the pieces of two francs and less, it was sensibly affected by this condition of affairs and consulted various commissions successively on the means of remedying the embarrassment to business which resulted from it.

After some hesitation these commissions called the attention of the Government to the method heretofore adopted by various states to preserve Silver in circulation concurrently with gold.

This method consists in establishing between coined gold and coined Silver, a divergence of value less considerable than that which is the result of their commercial value: Silver thus artificially appreciated is issued under the form of change, the legal tender of which is so limited as not to enable it to replace either gold or the silver coins of higher grade, in large payments.

The system of silver change, with limited legal tender, and with a proportion of alloy sufficient to prevent its being exported at a profit, has been in use for half a century in England with great success, and it has more lately been extended to the United States, Portugal, Switzerland, and Italy.

Your Government has regarded it as its duty to accept the counsels thus expressed to it, and which were supported by the facts of experience; in 1864 it proposed to the Legislative Body the application of this new system in France, in asking that silver coins of 2 francs, 1 frane, 50 centimes and 20 centimes, be struck at the fineness of 835 thousandths instead of the fineness of 900 thousandths which has been ordained by the Law of 7 Germinal Year XI. The proposition as presented was accompanied by all the precautions, the limit of Legal Tender, the eventual redemption by the State, which would be of a nature to reassure the public.

The Legislative Body, through motives of circumspection which can be easily understood, adopted only the principle of the project which was submitted to it, and proposed, and their proposition was accepted by your Government, to restrict its application to Silver coins of the smaller denominations. The Law of May 25, 1864, authorized the coinage, up to the amount of 30 millions, of fractional coins of 50 and 20 centimes of