"Next comes the Florin system, which would reckon all in florins and cents of florins. This makes the pound a natural decimal multiple;-and so far good. But it assumes a silver monetary standard, whereas, for good or for evil, for better or for worse, we are married to a gold one. I do not mean to say a silver standard would not be better; I believe it would: and I believe a binary standard-half silver, half gold, at the option of either party to insist on-would be better than either; but gold is our standard of value, and we are lashed on to it, and must be carried along with it, toss as it may. "Then comes the Shilling system. It has no one point to recommend it but its copper dime. The sovereign must be called a twenty-shilling piece; the penny must be demonetised; and we are landed in a system having no relation to any other in Europe, or elsewhere. "The Penny system is a little better. It would give us a franc not very far from the French, and a pound of 200 pence, which was the old Saxon pound of Ethelbert. I took occasion not very long ago to suggest this for a Canadian pound; but it is quite visionary as applied to England. "So, I conclude, we must stick to the pound. It is a national institution ingrained into all our notions, and I hold it impossible to oust it. The true office of the ten-shilling piece is to break the sovereign, and lessen the amount of silver necessary to be kept up."* If additional reasons were required to show the desirableness of retaining the pound sterling as the integer, those given by Professor Airy would be irresistible : "I can scarcely conceive it possible, except by the most violent and offensive measures, to change the principal money of account from its present value of the pound sterling. Every estimation of large, and even of very moderate sums, is formed by the pound. I do not attach great importance to such things as the national debt, or the rental of the country; but the price and rental of private estates, the salaries of offices, the annual wages of servants, down to those of the lowest female servant-in larger matters, the expense of constructing a railway or sailing a ship ;—all are estimated by pounds. An alteration of the value of the pound would unhinge every estimate and every contract in England. I * Minutes of Evidence, p. 90. say advisedly every contract, for the shilling is inseparably connected with the pound; and every real contract which is not ostensibly made by the pound, is made by the shilling. To this class belong an infinity of shop purchases, and an infinity of weekly wages of workmen, occasional servants, and the like. If pence enter into these matters, it is merely as aliquot parts of the shilling, which can be supplied quite as well by the decimal division of the pound. "No important contract whatever, between man and man, is so made as to depend for its amount on the exact value of the penny. It is true that a Liverpool merchant may sell cotton per pound, or a Suffolk farmer may sell clover seed per pound, at prices below one shilling per pound, and therefore expressed on the existing system by pence. But he sells, not a single pound, but tons, and therefore the pence serve the purpose simply of subordinate parts of a shilling, and are expelled from the account before it is brought to the state of payment. The same would be done if any other scale of copper coinage below the shilling, as that of decimals from the pound, were in common use. 66 Many small articles in the retail trade are sold by the penny; balls of string, apples and oranges, seats in an omnibus, and the like. The principle of adjustment here, is a struggle between the desire of selling many, and the desire of making a large profit on each article. The adjustment is a very rough one, and will be made as easily on one scale as on another. It possesses no sort of permanence, being altered from hour to hour. "In a word, I may say that every habitual estimate, and every long, or permanent, or important contract, depends on the pound. The things which depend on the penny are insignificant, even to the lowest classes."* Mention a To the pound sterling, indeed, the most distinct and definite ideas attach-whether on small or large amounts. pound, five pounds, ten pounds, fifty pounds, a hundred pounds, a thousand pounds, ten thousand pounds, and your meaning is comprehended by everybody. But those who would make farthings, pence, or shillings, the integer or basis of account,-and each denomination has had its advocates,-forget that to speak of a hundred, or a thousand farthings, pence, or shillings, is to convey only a vague idea of value to the mind of the hearer. It should * Minutes of Evidence, p. 30, be remembered, that all the machinery of compound calculation is but an instrument for converting the smaller into the larger denomination, farthings into pence, to assist their being rendered into shillings, and from shillings into pounds. The relations of the lower denominations to a pound sterling, and in so far as a single pound sterling is concerned, may be intelligible enough; but beyond a pound they become complicated and entangled to the common understanding. And even within the range, it may be doubted if a majority of the labouring classes could answer off hand, and without the process of a mental calculation, how many pence go to a pound, or, still less, how many farthings! An exact representation of the new proposed system of keeping account in decimals, the pound sterling being the integer, may be seen in an old English book, by Richard Witt, published in 1613 and called "Arithmetical Questions, &c. &c., Briefly Resolved by means of certain Breviats;" of which Professor De Morgan says, "Decimal fractions are really used; the tables being constructed for ten millions of pounds, seven figures have to be cut off, and the reduction to shillings and pence, with a temporary decimal separation, is introduced when wanted. For instance, when the quarterly table of amounts of interest at ten per cent. is used for three years, the principal being £100, (page 99), in the table stands 137,266,429, which, multiplied by 100, and seven places cut off, gives the first line of the following citation :— Giving £1372 13s. 3d. for the answer. And the tables are expressly stated to consist of numerators, with 100 for a denominator." In the division decimal next to the pound I should have been glad to have seen the word dime employed instead of florin, to designate the tenth of a pound. The word disme (decime) is that by which the idea of a decimal system was first popularised, and ushered in (as it deserved to be) with a loud trumpeting forth of the miraculous value of the system-giving light from smoke, * A reprint of this work, by T. Fisher, London, 1634, duodecimo, is in the Royal Society's Library. born of a Divine Author, and worthy of being celebrated with a golden voice, in a hundred tongues, to a hundred ears, "and through all ages in perpetual praise."* There is an English translation by Richard Norton, 1608, the title of which is "Disme, the Art of Tenths," or Decimal Arithmetike, invented by the excellent mathematician Simon Stevin.t Dismes are frequently mentioned with reference to our revenues in the early records of the Exchequer. They are sometimes called Tallage of Tenths, and the tolls or duties paid by merchants were also called dismes. ‡ The objection to the word florin is its vagueness of signification, and its conveying no decimal idea whatever. The only florin known to English numismatic history, is a gold piece, of the value of six shillings, coined by Edward III., which soon disappeared from circulation, was adopted by none of his successors, and is rarely found even in large collections. The ancient florin of Italy, and the existing florins of Austria and Holland, represent value by no means corresponding to the tenth of the pound sterling. Though the issue of the florin has been of immense value in introducing and popularising a decimal system, the name of the coin has been obstructive, and is a cause of much confusion in our intercourse with foreign countries. It were much to be wished that the old English word dime, now re-established in the United States to represent the tenth of a dollar, should be legislatively sanctioned in this country as the tenth of a pound sterling. Evelyn says:-" Florins were coined in gold, in the reign of Edward III., by certain Florentine moneyers who were employed in England."§ From these, no doubt, they took their name. The "Non fumum ex fulgore sed ex fumo dare lucem Iagius Tornus, Philomates, appended to Gerard's Translation (French) of Stevin's Mathematical Works. † Dr. Peacock mentions that the early Dutch edition has “De Thiende Leirinde alle Reckeninger," Gouda, 1626. Tenths, teaching all reckonings. De Morgan, pp. 26, 27. Madox's Exchequer, p. 503. § Evelyn on Medals, p. 4. |