CURRENCY DECIMALIZATION.
[To sae Boma or THE " SPECTATOR.")
Ss,—The Report of the Institute of Bankers, which you dealt with in your bum, of October 13th under the heading " A Decimal Coinage for the Empire," deserves the respect which any Report issued from such an influential body is bound to command; but as this is not merely, nor even chiefly, a bankers' question, but a question of vital importance to the whole community, I would like, with your permission, to make a few observations on it, premising that there is no difference of opinion as to the pressing need for a reform of cur currency in the direction of decimaliza- tion, and in the knowledge that all actuarial calculations in this country are decimalized already.
The Report is emphatic on making everything hang on the sovereign. This, as the Bankers' Report shows, would involve some alterations in the value of our lower coins, and these would focus themselves in changes in the lowest denominations, which would entirely upset retail valuations and confuse workmen's wages in so far as these are paid by the hour. Now, when it is
postulated that everything is to be subordinated to the preserva- tion of the sovereign at its present level of weight and fineness, it is proper to consider what the sovereign in itself is, and when that is done it is found to be a piece of gold of a certain weight and a certain fineness on which a certain stamp has been put, and that stamp guarantees its genuineness. It only attained its un- questioned supremacy a hundred years ago, when the coinage of the guinea was discontinued after about one hundred and fifty years' experience, and even to-day a donation of twenty guineas to
charitable institution is liquidated by a payment of twenty-one sovereigns. It would certainly be much easier for the compara- tively small body of educated bankers to adjust themselves to a change in the sovereign titan for the people to accustom themselves to a change in the lower denominations of currency. It would therefore seem to be the wiser course, instead of banging every- thing on the sovereign, to build up everything from the coin of lowest value which is in ordinary use—viz., the halfpenny—and base the decimalization on that. We would thus progress by stages of a halfpenny, a penny, a five-halfpenny nickel piece, a ten-halfpenny silver piece, a twenty-five-halfpenny piece, which would about equal the present shilling, and a fifty-halfpenny or two-shilling piece, finally arriving at our four-shilling piece, which, as the Bankers' Report points out, is practically equivalent to the American and Canadian dollar. Retail values would remain unaffected, wages would be undis- turbed, and our system so far would be identical with the Canadian and American system (used already, be it remembered. by two-thirds of the English-speaking peoples). Cents and dollars wodld therefore be the coins of account, but the latter might be called crowns if we DO preferred. (The coinage in all gold- standard countries below the gold level is merely token coinage, and as silver in this country is only legal tender up to 40s. a little more or less silver in a coin would make practically no difference, and the introduction of nickel in our coinage would be a distinct advantage.) We would then go on to the sovereign, and it would only be necessary to raise the sovereign by as much gold as would bring it up to the level of the five-dollar piece to bring our entire system into unison with that of North America. Practically all the gold in the country is at present in the hands of the Govern- ment and has been replaced by paper. When the war is over replacing this paper by gold will be a matter of time. It would be an easy matter for the Government to recoin the gold at the new value before reissuing it, and it would be immediately found in practice that the purchasing-power of the sovereign would have advanced by exactly the equivalent of the gold added to it.
We would thus take a step which would not only bring us into line with the coinage system prevailing throughout the whole English-speaking portion of the North American Continent, but we would take a very long step indeed towards the undoing of the evil work of 1770 and promoting that ultimate federation of the English-speaking races all over the world which ought to be the object of the higher statesmanship. It would not be easy to per- suade Canada, whose monetary and commercial system is so closely interwoven with that of the United States, to adopt the scheme of the Institute of Bankers. It would surely be preferable to use Canada as a bridge betveen us and the United States rather than dissociate ourselves from Canada in this important matter. The whole question, after all, ought not to be treated as a matter of purely insular concern. There is no subject within the range of statesmanship which could with greater propriety be referred to an Imperial Conference representing all the Dominions, and it is to be hoped that this will be fully considered before we depart from our present system, because any change we make now will be final, in so far at least as there is any
finality in human affairs.—I am, Sir, Lc., ANDREW Low. Glasgow.
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