what Page 152 they can make by transporting it? We have more English gold in Amsterdam than you have (in England), all sent within those twenty years, and great quantities of English silver have weekly come over in pinks and Dutch men-of-war for years, to the value of many hundred thousands of pounds, in return for coin. I wondered at first how the merchants transported all the weighty and culled English money into Holland, until one of the bankers told me. I would have you inquire it and prevent it, for it is a most pernicious thing. It is the goldsmiths, especially those in Lombard Street, which are the greatest merchants, and London cashiers, and who will receive any man's money for nothing, and pay it for them the same or next day, and meantime keep people in their upper rooms to cull and weigh all they receive, and melt down the weighty, and transport it to foreign parts, sometimes without melting, and keep banks for all the principal coin in Christendom in their shops."
The succeeding years of the Commonwealth saw little change in the situation. In 1659 and 1660 the Council was still anxiously debating the question of the transport of bullion and coin. But this chain of phenomena refers to the third period in this history, and are to be treated of in that connection.
In broadest and hastiest résumé, and this