COINS AS CONVENIENCES.
TT seems pretty certain that the half-sovereign, the favourite gold coin of this generation, has been already sentenced, and will in April next be formally ordered for execution. The Economist would hardly have made its statement of Saturday on the subject without authority, and the official reasons for the abolition are nearly if not quite unanswerable. The bankers of London and the provinces cannot bear any longer the in- creasing and most unjust fine inflicted upon their shareholders by the worn condition of the gold coinage. A large proportion of the gold pieces in circulation are light, and daily growing lighter, and the ordinary banks cannot afford to quarrel with their customers by rejecting them. The Bank of England, however, and the central Government offices can; and the consequence is, that the banks which make payments to the Bank of England and the Treasury, have to bear nearly the whole cost of all "clipped" and " sweated " and used-up gold coin, a cost said to be equal in the aggregate to a fine of 2100,000 a year. There is no justice in such an arrangement, and Mr. Goschen, it is understood, has determined to amend it, and not only to renew the light coinage in circulation, but to carry out a system whereby the gold of the Kingdom—the ultimate standard of all financial. transactions throughout the world—shall be automatically renewed. To effect this end at a reasonable cost to the taxpayer, it is essential that the baMsovereign should be peremptorily withdrawn. That is the smallest gold coin, and the thinnest, and the most popular ; and it is therefore the one which is most rapidly worn out. To restore it once would be com- paratively easy, but to restore it perpetually, would be most costly ; and as it is of no use in accounts and of 'no import-
ance in commerce, it must, we imagine, go. The financiers of both parties have agreedtothat—Mr. Childers having proposed to make the coin a mere token—but the public has not as yet accepted their verdict; and unless a substitute can be found for the coin, the public may prove unexpectedly recalcitrant. The electors know very little about currency—less, perhaps, than of any other subject, except the building of war-ships-- but they know a great deal about coins as conveniences, and they may not-give up the most convenient coin in circula- tion without an angry protest. They like a coin which will pack almost as easily as the sovereign—five pounds' worth occupying little space even in the small purses used to-day, or in the waistcoat pocket—yet which everybody will change without demur. Tradesmen will not change sovereigns in silence. We have never quite understood the reluctance of shopkeepers, especially in the country, to keep a little bank of silver, and renew it once a week. They pay nothing extra for the inferior metal; the hanks will supply any quantity— the talk about a " scarcity " of silver is illusory—the bank clerks do the counting; and the danger of loss is infinitesimal; yet nine shopkeepers in ten, if a customer tenders a sovereign in payment for -anything under five shillings, will either re- monstrate, or offer to book the debt, or send out an assistant to get change. They have a reason, of course, of some sort for avoiding an accumulation of silver ; but nobody has ever found out what it is, or why some etiquette prevents them from applying the same reasoning to the smaller gold coin. They do not do it, however; they all take half-sovereigns with- out a word ; and as a consequence, all men who have small purchases to make, and all women whatsoever, prefer the half-sovereign to any other coin. Stay, that is not quite trne. There is a class both of men and women who will never voluntarily take a half-sovereign, who denounce it as the most "expensive' of all coins, and who believe, pro- bably from long experience, that two half-sovereigns are spent twice as rapidly as the sovereign when whole. The majority, however, like the piece, and it is the majority with whom Mr- G-oschen will have to reckon.
Is a substitute possible? There is silver, of course, in any quantity, and it is the interest of all men, and of the State, that the demand for silver should be as large as possible ; but then, silver is only a substitute for gold in the eyes of ec-onomists, currency doctors, and persons on weekly wages. To the ordinary middle-class man or woman, Mr. Goschen might just as well talk about copper as a substitute for silver. No -woman's. purse will hold a hundred shillings, and no man's waistcoat pocket without bulging; and as for five-and-twenty _double:florins, they almost want a porter. The common objection to the double-florin, that it is too like a half- crown, is, we admit, a little hypercritical. The coins are, no doubt, a little alike in face, both carrying that pre- posterous libel on the Queen with her crown tumbling off; but the design on the reverse of each is strikingly separate, and there is no resemblance whatever as to size. The public will soon learn to know the difference by the mere touch, and the Aouble-fiorin will soon be popular enough,—that is, in units or small numbers. It will never, however, be taken willingly in exchange for a five-pound note, or even for a sovereign ; and will, therefore, in no way mitigate the regret for the departed gold coin. Men, and still more women, want something port- able, something that will go in a purse, and not a heap of silver which it will almost take a despatch-bag to carry home, and which, when lodgedin a bag, will rattle, to the edification of all thieves. No metal token, again, would do, for the tempta- tion to reproduce it would be irresistible to the forger ; and • he can nowadays strike any coin just as well as a Mint, and would, we doubt not, if invited, suggest a good many improvements in the machinery now used. _ Ee knows a great deal too much for his moral health about artistic _design, and will produce a gold piece of Philip of Macedon, or Ptolemy in a style which deceives sometimes even the most skilled numismatists. The only resource, therefore, is paper ; but then, apart from the broad dispute about paper currency, which we have no intention of discussing here, paper will do exceedingly well. A ten-shilling note is as portable as a half- sovereign, will pack into as small a compass, and is as little likely to be lost. It will not go rolling about as half-sovereigns do, and though it is destructible, the instinct of property will preserve it as it preserves the one-pound note, or, for that matter, the penny postage-stamp. Nobody ever heard a Scotch- man complain complain that he was always tearing up his money, or
lighting his pipe with his change, or running his finger through the capital in his, purse. The ten-shilling note will be as safe as
a sheet of stamps, and everybody contrives to keep them from the fire, and the wind, and the little children's habits of destruction. The only objections, in feet, to a ten-shilling note, beyond the exceeding dirtiness of all.pa.per money except that now issued by the Bank of England, are the cost of striking the notes and the risk of forgery on a large scale. That argument about cast is constantly reproduced, but we suspect there is very little in it. How much do the money- orders cost which now fulfil many of the functions of small notes We cannot, of course, use the nice, crisp, wealth- suggesting Bank paper for ten-shilling notes ; but if the Governments of the Continent can make them sufficiently good to pass, so a fortiori can we. The Bank engineers are not so resourceless as all that, or if they are, Messrs. De La Rue will turn out handsome notes by the thousand sheets on the first hint that the Treasury finds official difficulties in its way. Besides, will the cost matter so very much ? The notes, intended as they are for internal currency, can be based upon silver just as well as upon gold, and the profit upon the issue of that silver will be very considerable indeed. Twenty shilling-pieces, with 12 per cent. of alloy in them, are worth just now, taking silver at 42d. an ounce, not quite 12s. 6d. There must, under those circumstances, be a great margin for a decent ten-shilling note, and, of course, the more decent it is, the less will be the forger's chance. Indeed, we do not know that he will have much temptation. The risk of forgery is a very serious one to run for ten shillings, the public soon becomes marvellously sharp where small interests are concerned, and as a matter of fact, the Scotch are ex- ceedingly little harassed by artistic forgery. The stake is not big enough for men with the brains required, or to pay for the construction of very elaborate, and therefore recognisable, printing machinery. We doubt if the risk from forgery would be much greater than the risk from coining, which, though considerable, has never affected the free circulation either of gold or silver coins. If the cost is not too great, and the forger can be baffled, the Englishman will "take to" ten- shilling notes just as readily as he has done to cheques and money-orders.
While we are upon the subject of convenient coins, we should like to ask a question again which we have asked before. Are all the banks in a ring to limit the use of cheques If they are not, why do not they issue cheque- books which can be easily carried about, cheque-books no bigger than pocket-books, interleaved for the counterfoils? A cheque-book is now either too big and too hard altogether for the pocket, or makes up into a most inconvenient and crumply roll. There is no difficulty whatever about making little cheque-books—in fact, every salesman in a big shop uses one—and they would be the greatest possible convenience to depositors, and the greatest relief to the demand for gold. We are quite aware that a banker likes best the customer who de- posits most and draws least frequently, and watches the cost of clerical labour with a most jealous eye ; but surely, in these days of competition, it must be worth the while even of bankera to study general convenience. The cheques need not be stamped, if that is a difficulty, for everybody carries postage-stamps, and the risk of their being lost is infinitesimal. Street thieves cannot forge an unknown victim's name. At present the idea seems to be that a cheque-book should never be used except in its owner's home or office, and every depositor is formally warned to keep it "under lock and key." He might just as well be warned always to keep his sovereigns in the banker's till. He wants his cheque-book to use, not to lock up in a drawer.
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