inarticulate agony of the widespread ruin in sympathy and imagination merely. The details here given are taken entirely from the State papers, stolid and ungarnished, but the tale they tell is momentous and dire in its importance.
When consulted by the Privy Council, the various committees and delegates of the merchants attributed the crisis to the deceits practised in the manufacture of cloth, to the embargo on its sale, and other such causes, as well as to the scarcity of money, and the loss in exchange. The first suggestion is hardly worth a moment's consideration. Every testimony points to the fact that the crisis was as purely a monetary or currency crisis, as later crises have been distinguishedly credit crises. Between 1613 and 1621 hardly any silver monies were coined in the English Mint; for example, between 1617 and 1620 the total silver coinage was only £1070, whereas in the four succeeding years the silver coinage at the Tower Mint amounted to £205,500.
"From the year 1621," says one of the informers of 1638, to whose petition reference will be shortly made, "many goldsmiths and cashiers of London culled the weighty shillings and sixpences to make into plate, silver wire, and to other manufactures; for most of that time, we having wars with Spain, little or no silver came from thence; so likewise hath little or no silver from France in that time, and no Page 145