Page:Georg Freidrich Knapp - The State Theory of Money (1924 translation).pdf/214

II The exactory change is restoratory if the State restores a kind of money into its former position as valuta.

This implies that in the existing currency there is a kind of money which formerly was valuta but now has become accessory and has a positive agio.

The following well-known example will make this clear.

During the Napoleonic wars England fell into a paper standard. When peace was concluded in 1815, preparations were at once made to restore the gold standard, and in a few years this was done. The process was purely restoratory in spite of the fact that the guinea was not again coined, but was replaced by the sovereign, for, if the contents of the two coins were in the ratio of 21 to 20, the face values also were in the same ratio.

In like manner the silver standard which was introduced into Austria in 1858 by Freiherr Von Bruck, and lasted some months, was purely restoratory. The new silver gulden (“Austrian standard”) was, it is true, smaller than the old one, and as it happens, too, in the ratio of 20 to 21, but its face value was less in the same proportion, though the pieces had a different size.

Italy, which similarly harboured a paper standard for a long time, went back to a gold standard. The gold twenty-lire pieces were again valuta. This too is a restoratory change of standard if we assume