the members of the Latin Union, although, "according to us, the fall of silver in 1875 prescribed a complete cessation even for that year rather than a simple limitation."
Germany.
Until the unification of Germany in our own days, and the adoption of the present imperial currency system, German monetary history reproduces perpetually all the elements of that mediæval system, bimetallic in fact though not theoretically so conceived, which England flung away in 1816, and from the toils of which France has not as yet completely emerged.
As safeguards against the evils of that system which she had felt with such bitter experience, and Page 198 which had culminated in the crisis closing the Thirty Years' War, Germany could only feebly employ the mechanism of ineffectual Mint conventions. For a century she persevered in the effort to establish a common standard and Mint system, but in vain. The attempt had to be abandoned, and the reeling system left to its own process of disintegration; and when at last the events of 1871 came to give her unity in her coinage, as well as political life, there were not less than nine distinct and independent coinage systems in existence.
Hardly had the crisis of the Thirty Years' War passed out of mind before again the currency system had begun to work its baneful effects.
In 1665 complaints were loudly made of the corrupt and debased state of the coin, due to export and culling. There is, indeed, quite a literature of these same complaints. The language of the Reichstattisches conclusum (Ratisbon, 12th September 1666) expressly attributes