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A Practical Plan for Assimilating the English and American Money
A Practical Plan for Assimilating the English and American Money Author:Walter Bagehot Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II. THE KEAL ADVANTAGE OF AN INTERNATIONAL MEASURE OF ACCOUNT. We have explained that some of the alleged reasons for changing our coinage, and for using o... more »ne which foreigners would use, too, were not sound. The advantages were indisputable, but they were not worth the cost at which they would be purchased. We have now to state the great advantages which make it well worth while to think whether we should not make a great effort to establish an international money. Those who have paid most attention to it for the most part think that it is. The essential point in which an international money would help commerce is very plain. Suppose that trade circulars were all expressed in a single currency instead of being, as now, expressed in many currencies, would they not be far easier to understand ? ' I have before me,'says Mr. Hendriks, the eminent actuary, 'Morgan's British Trade Circular, which is a good example among the many trade circulars which are published. The amounts are there represented in pounds, shillings, and pence; for instance, we find sums like 44s. 6d. per cwt.—2s. ld. per stone.' And illiterate merchants in foreign countries, not knowing our mode of reckoning, are in a perfect puzzle as to what they would get for their goods. Clever and knowing men can make their calculations, hut ordinary men cannot. Our imports are liable to diminution because the mass of foreign traders do not comprehend our price language. We have to pay the cost of their learning it. Some few know it,—few, that is, in comparison with the mass of men,—and they make a kind of monopoly—a source of privileged irreducible profit—out of it. Our exports suffer probably more. Mr. Behrens, of Bradford, one of the most eminent authorities on the subject, observes: ' One of the great advantages whi...« less