A WORD IN BEHALF OF THE FENNY. • S331 — May I
be permitted to say a word in behalf of the penny ? -r assure your correspondent "A: D: that it is popular far beyond his estimate. The largest number of the daily purchases in the kingdom are reckoned in pence. He talks of the transition from pence to cents as an easy matter, and that the community have " merely to multiply. by four and add one- twenty-fourth part" to find the decimal equivalent in cents of a Ronny, to which. beloved coin all their calculations and estimates of value will infal- libly revert for half a century at least. It will give your correspondent, as
i
well as many more of our currency reformers, some insight into the chaos to which the abolition of the penny will reduce the reckonings of the people, to whom he proposes this off-hand addition of fractions, if he will, ascertain what proportion of his acquaintance male and female, adult and infant, can tell hum off-hand what a third and a fourth of a penny make. Let him try this experiment, for example, in the drawingrooms of May Fair,, and then teat the House of Commons, and reflect on the result, before he imposes his fractional formula on the working classes whenever they wish to know the value of their bread' and bacon. My humble suggestion is, to raise the value of the penny to five cents, and retails it both as a coin of account and of currency. My reasons are briefly these.
1. It gets rid of the arithmetical difficulty, and the popular penny becomes a decimal coin. 2. It enables us to retain the whole of the existing copper coinage, The halfpennies will be useful as currency ; and the farthings, though a trifle larger than the precise one-fifth of the penny or five-cent piece, will prac- tically pass as cents without the slightest difficulty.
3. So far from the penny-piece being of lees intrinsic value than the tenth part of a shilling, as I propose to make it, that is already about its actual value ; and the broad-rimmed pence of George the Third are above that value. 4. The poorer classes and smaller shopkeepers may continue to use pence as coins of account without causing the slightest difficulty or confusion, as those who prefer the decimal notation can have no difficulty in reducing, the pence to cents, or vice versa. 5. If the populace must be taught some change, which I presume is in- evitable, nothing can be so easily taught them as that their pence are of more value than before, and that 'ten make a shilling : this fact will compel tradesmen to adjust their prices, and charge small purchases by cents ; so that the poor will be gainers rather than losers. Tolls, Bre. will adopt the penny or four-cents according to the circumstances of each case.
6. I have reserved what I deem the great recommendation of my propo- sal for the last. It will raise the postage, receipt, and draft stamps, to an extent which while it will not aggrieve the public, for they are already ad- mitted to be unduly lowered, will yield a very acceptable increase of revenue to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. I am, Sir, yours obediently, J. Svstoxs. P. S.—I see no other objection to the coinage of a half-cent piece than its utter uselessness. Did any one, except an indignant British jury, ever want a coin worth less then half-a-farthing ?
Previous page
