For the upper classes of all countries, the people who travel, and have to stand the nuisance and loss of changing their money at every frontier, the bankers and international merchants who have to cumber their accounts with the fluctuating item of exchange between commercial centres will insist upon it. All the European nations, with the exception of Russia and Turkey, are ready for the change, and when these reach the stage of real constitutionalism in their progress upward, they will be compelled to follow, being already deeply in debt to the French, English, and Germans. Japan may be counted upon to acquiesce instantly in any unit agreed upon by the rest of the civilized world."
This writer points out that the opening out of the uncivilized parts of the world to commerce will alone serve to make an international coinage absolutely indispensable.
Without, however, introducing a really new system, an auxiliary international money system (corresponding to an auxiliary international language) could be introduced as a medium of exchange without interfering with the existing coinages of the various nations. Réné de Saussure (writing in the Journal de Genève, in 1907) has insisted on the immense benefit such a system of "monnaie de compte" would be in removing the burden imposed upon all international financial relations by the diversity of money values. He argues that the best point of union would be a gold piece of eight grammes—almost exactly equivalent to one pound, twenty marks, five dollars, and twenty-five francs—being, in fact, but one-third of a penny different from the value of a pound sterling. For the subdivisions the point of union must be decimally divided, and M. de Saussure would give the name of speso to a ten-thousandth part of the gold coin.