from this action of a bimetallic law, and the modern insular pamphleteer has before his eyes no sign of Page 179 its workings in his own country. He therefore assumes an universality of such experience, and attributes it to the French legislative ratio. It is in no polemic spirit, but simply in the interest of science that this particular misapplication of history to the squaring of a theory is to be branded. The plainest facts of history are thereby absolutely misrepresented, and the assumption of cause and effect is so far from being true that the repose of the English currency history in the nineteenth century is to be attributed to the absence of a bimetallic system; to its despite rather than its presence and influence. To instance only by France for the moment.
The course of the actual or market ratio has been already stated in the table ( supra , pp. 157-59). In the graphic representation of this ( opposite ) the legal ratio of 15 1⁄2 is represented by the fixed line x.y. , the actual ratio by the fluctuating black line z . At no point do these lines coincide. After three years of fluctuations, 1803-06, now above and now below, the ratio sinks persistently below for seven years, 1807-13, touching the lowest point (a ratio of 16.24) in 1813. For the succeeding five or six years, 1813-19, the ratio was as consistently above the legal rate, though with less violence and width of divergence. From the latter year, 1819, up to 1850, its course was undeviatingly below 15 1⁄2, then