"Were all princes' words and actions conformable to this model, there would never be a commonweath's man in England, and I am persuaded there are few at this time, notwithstanding the outcry that is made, and the dust that is raised, to blind the people's eyes and create the prince's distrust, I mean in that hated sense wherein 'tis usually taken as exclusive of kingship; for, as to the other sense wherein 'twas anciently used, the good queen has twice sanctified it in this very speech, how frightful soever the very sound of it be to some persons.

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My pains has been no more than only to transcribe this speech out of the learned Camden's History of Queen Elizabeth,' where it was lain as it were under rubbish, and was as little thought of as if it had been spoken above two thousand years ago, not in this very same age. Pray read it often; consider it well, recommend it to your friends, and let them with you judge whether such a constitution as ours is owned and declared to be in this speech be not worth every Englishman's care and diligence, the prince's as well as the people's, to preserve upon its true bottom."

Before writing that letter Locke had done much towards the second of the two great reforms of which at this time he was a chief promoter.

We have seen how, five years or more previously, he had begun to warn his friends as to the deplorable consequences of the prevalence and. steady increase of moneyclipping and, in a long chapter added to his anonymous tract on 'The Lowering of Interest,' had seriously protested against the specious arguments of those who thought that the only way to prevent the illegal depreciation of the currency effected by the clippers was for the government itself to issue a depreciated currency. There can be no doubt that all through the interval he had continued often to think and talk on the subject, and he had good reason to do this on private as well as on public grounds. “I shall, I think, in the beginning of July have some money paid me in, and perhaps some sooner," he wrote to Clarke at the end of May, 1695. "Pray tell me whether I cannot refuse clipped money; for I take it not to be the lawful

Et. 63.

coin of England, and I know not why I should receive half the value I lent, instead of the whole."1

It would seem that Locke now circulated among his friends copies of the tract that had been published in 1692, with the avowed object both of stirring up interest in the subject, and of obtaining criticisms that might help him in writing more upon it. "With my treatise of Education," he said in a letter to Molyneux, "you will receive another little one concerning Interest and Coinage. It is one of the fatherless children which the world lays at my door; but, whoever be the author, I shall be glad to know your opinion of it." 2 The letter containing Molyneux's opinion is missing; but we have Locke's reply, showing that Molyneux praised it greatly, and asked for another copy, as he had given away the one already received by him. Locke complied with this request. "But 'tis to you I send it," he said, "and not to anybody else. You may give it to whom you please, for 'tis yours as soon as you receive it; but pray do not give it to anybody in my name, or as a present from me; and however you are pleased to make me a compliment in making me the author of a book you think well of, yet you may be sure I do not own it to be mine. You, I see, are troubled there "-in Ireland-" about your money as well as we are here, though I hope you are not so deep in that disease as we are. 193 "The affair of our money, which is in a lamentable state," he had said in an earlier letter, "is now under debate here. What the issue will be I know not: I pray for a good one. I find everybody

1 Additional MSS., no. 4290; Locke to Clarke, 25 May, 1695.

26 Familiar Letters,' p. 118; Locke to William Molyneux, 2 July, 1695.

Ibid., p. 127; Locke to William Molyneux, 20 Nov., 1695.

almost looks on it as a mystery. To me there appears to be none at all in it. 'Tis but stripping it of the cant which all men that talk of it involve it in, and there is nothing easier. Lay by the arbitrary names of pence and shillings, and consider and speak of it as grains and ounces of silver, and 'tis as easy as telling of twenty."

The question was easy enough to understand and explain, but not so easy to bring to a practical solution. The cant in which it was involved, as Locke said, though honestly adopted by many, was prompted by shrewd men who, either for their own profit, or under a false conception of the interests of the nation, industriously propounded opinions that Locke found it hard work, not to controvert, but to discredit. Fortunately he had friends in the government who shared his views, and not only eagerly sought his advice, but were really anxious to follow it. Charles Montagu, who had been made chancellor of the exchequer in April, 1694, the greatest financier who had ever occupied the post, and who had won it by his successful insistance on Paterson's project of the Bank of England, had an able coadjutor, if not leader, in Lord Keeper Somers; and both of them knew the value of Locke's counsel. Being the most influential of the lords justices-the body of seven to whom, after Queen Mary's death, the administration of affairs was entrusted during the king's absence on the continent, and who, after his return, continued in an irregular way to perform some of the functions of a cabinet-Somers induced his colleagues in October, not apparently for the first time during this year, to invite Locke to come up from Oates to confer with them. King William was now on his way from a successful campaign in the Netherlands, and use was to 1 'Familiar. Letters,' p. 126; Locke to William Molyneux, 16 Nov., 1695.

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be made of his good fortune in dissolving the old parliament a step rendered necessary, it is true, by the recently passed triennial act-and electing a new one, as patriotic as it could be, in which currency reform was to be the first business discussed. "A little before his majesty's return," Locke wrote to Molyneux, "the lords justices had this matter under their consideration, and, amongst others, were pleased to send to me for my thoughts about it. This is too publicly known here to make the mentioning of it to you appear vanity in me."1 Their lordships appear to have been just now especially troubled by a pamphlet "for encouraging the coining silver money in England, and after for keeping it here," which we only know through Locke's reply to it, but which seems to have been considered more important than any of the others that were plentiful at the time. The pamphlet was an answer to Locke's chapter on "raising the value of money" in the treatise that he had published three years before. Locke criticised it paragraph by paragraph in a paper which he drew up for the lords justices, and which, as it convinced them that no sort of justification could be found for coining money with a denomination in excess of its actual value, was at once printed and widely circulated throughout the country.2

Before long a more formidable adversary had to be defeated. William Lowndes, an indefatigable public ser

1695.

Familiar Letters,' p. 128; Locke to William Molyneux, 20 Nov.,

2 Short Observations on a Printed Paper, entitled, For Encouraging the Coining Silver Money in England, and after for keeping it here' (1695), 24 pp. This tract need not be described, as its arguments were repeated more fully and effectively in Locke's next publication on the subject.

vant, who, after some sixteen years of subordinate employment, was made secretary to the treasury by Montagu in April, 1695, and who held that post with great credit to himself, and great advantage to the country, during nearly eight-and-twenty years, rendering unobtrusive but extremely valuable service by his reformation and honest and energetic oversight of the national account-keeping, had been directed, early in the year, to collect statistics "of divers matters which concern the gold and silver moneys, and of the most practicable methods for new coining the latter, and supplying, in the meantime, sufficient coins to pay the king's taxes and revenues, and to carry on the public commerce." 1

Such statistics were absolutely needed as preliminary to a reform of the currency; and that Lowndes executed the task assigned to him very well indeed is attested by the report, which he dated the 12th of September, though it does not appear to have been seen by the government till two months later. He learnedly summed up the history of the coinage from ancient times, explained the successive variations in sterling and changes in the method of coining, and described with painful exactness the deplorable state to which the use of clipped money had brought the country. Of the silver coins brought into the exchequer within three months, in 1695, amounting in nominal value to 57,2001., and which ought to have weighed 221,418 ounces, he reported that the actual weight was only 113,771 ounces, showing that the real was hardly more than half the nominal value, and arguing from that average that the silver coin then in

1 Lowndes; 'A Report containing an Essay for the Amendment of the Silver Coins' (1695), p. 8.