impaired specimens remained current, while shillings and sixpences had lost every sign of impression. Up to 1763 only a matter of £5791 in silver had issued from the Mint—practically no coinage at all.
Gradually however, owing to the force of wider principles at work, the matter of the ratio righted itself. Ever since 1756 the value of gold had been rising all over Europe. In 1759 the continental ratio was still calculated at 14 1⁄2, as compared with 15 1⁄5 in England; but by 1773 the continental ratio had overtaken the English, and the market price of standard silver had risen to 5s. 2d. per oz.—the English Mint rate. In the greatly depreciated state of the silver coinage—three-fourths of it was said to be base—even the approach of a fair ratio acted prejudicially on gold. Already, in 1771, the export of gold to Holland had become noticed, and it was asserted that the gold coins had never before been so deficient. They were sent over to Holland, and there filed and returned and put into circulation—a bimetallic phenomenon that always recurs in a currency containing two differently depreciated elements.
The idea that bimetallic action replaces one good metal by another, an equal weight of one metal for that of the other, a good undepreciated coinage of silver for a good undepreciated coinage of gold, or vice versâ, is not borne out by a single instance in Page 233 history. Bimetallic action always substitutes the less for the greater, whether weight or value, the more depreciated for the less, or the depreciated for the perfect standard