Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 7.djvu/22

 REIGN OF ELIZABETH. [en. 41. the poisonous gangrene of the currency, the shame and scandal of the late reigns, had been completely healed. No measure in Elizabeth's reign has received more deserved praise than the reformation of the coinage. The applause indeed has at times overpassed her merit - r for some historians have represented it as accomplished at the cost of the Crown ; whereas the expense, even to the calling in and recoining the base money, was born& to the last penny by the country. Elizabeth and her advisers deserve the credit only of having looked in the face, and of having found the means of dealing with, a complicated and most difficult problem. When the ministers of Edward the Sixth arrived at last at the conviction that the value of a shilling de- pended on the amount of pure silver contained in it, and that the base money therefore with which the country had been flooded must be called down to its natural level, the people it was roughly calculated had lost some- thing over a million pounds. An accurate computation however was impossible, for the issues of the Govern- ment, large as they were, had been exceeded by those of private coining establishments in England and abroad, where the pure coin left in circulation was melted down and debased. The evil had been rather increased than diminished by the first efforts at reformation. The current money was called down to an approach to its value in bullion, and it was then left in circulation under the impression that it would no longer be pernicious ; but the pure