Same Ratio for Coins and Bullion. 157

them felt the importance of the general coinage and circulation of both metals and at their relative market values, but that they failed to hit upon the plan of jointmetallism, which compels the use of both together, with ratios always based on their relative market values, without frequent recoinings, and prevents one precious metal from driving out the other.

Of Oresme and Copernicus Macleod says: Nicholas Oresme, afterwards Bishop of Lisieux, who wrote a Treatise on the Coinage, which may justly be said to stand at the head of modern economic literature. But the doctrines maintained by these two great authorities are absolutely identical. They are 5. That the coins of gold and silver must bear the same ratio to each other as the metals in bullion do in the market : They quite perceived the impossibility of keeping gold and silver coins in circulation together in unlimited quantities, at a legal ratio differing from the market ratio of the metals.

It was left to the genius

of Petty and Locke to discover that the true remedy for the perpetual confusion caused by attempting to keep gold and silver coins in unlimited quantities in circulation together at a legal ratio differing from the market ratio, was to adopt one metal only as the standard, and to make coins of any other metal subsidiary to it,

that the coins should be altered in their weights from time to time to meet the alterations in the market value of the metals. Such a plan is absolutely impracticable. It would possess no element of stability. Every change in the market value of the metals would require a fresh calling in and recoining of the coinage, at an expense and worry which no country could stand. All other remedies being exhausted, there is no resource but to adopt Petty and Locke's' plan of Monometalism."

To this I answer that the true remedy is to use the two metals on substantially equal terms according to the plan I have called joint-metallism.

My book, Joint-Metallism, appears not

1 See page 129.

Roscher, Wolowski, and Cossa.

159

to have been read by Macleod, whose work was published two months after mine. He certainly had no intention of favoring joint-metallism. Indeed he claims that very little metallic little metallic money is required for use in the world's trade and commerce.

Macleod is the highest juridical authority on forms and uses of credit, and his very eminence in this department has led him, I think, to a dangerously exaggerated estimate of the position of credits as a basis for currency.

An economist of commanding ability, he is more juridical than judgmatical, a great philosophical writer of history, with a purpose, and more an advocate than a judge.

Macleod mentions, in a note, the edition of the treatises of Oresme and Copernicus published by Guillaumin et Cie., Paris, 1864. But he omits to mention the names of Roscher and Wolowski who had written so ably thirty years before him, regarding those grand old economists. Nor does he mention what Cossa had written in the Introduction to the Study of Political Economy.'

'See also Cunningham's Growth of English Industry and Commerce.

HISTORY OF THE SCIENCE OF

MONEY.1

Nicole Oresme, the fourteenth century college president and political economist, councillor to Charles V. of France, and Count Bishop of Lisieux, appears to have been the founder of the modern

science of money. His Traictie de la pre

mière Invention des Monnoies was written about 1366.

Nicolas Copernicus, the great astronomer, Canon of Frauenburg, and adviser of Sigismund I. of Poland, wrote Monete3 Cudende Ratio in 1526.

3

These works are in the Astor Library, where I found them uncut. They are not in the Mercantile Library.

M. L. Wolowski, the very able editor and annotator of the edition of these

1 See Preface to Second Edition.

"He signed his name Nicole, not Nicholas.

3 He does not use the diphthong æ in this title.