Page:Repository of Arts, Series 1, Volume 01, 1809, January-June.djvu/52

 on projected speculations in matters of exchange by means of arbitrations.

The first volume concludes with a view of Exchange Circulations, which are classed under two heads:

“1. Operations by which the possessors of limited capital are enabled to undertake and sustain concerns of far greater magnitude, or by which a competency to future responsibility is made subservient to immediate or ultimate advantage.

“2. Operations to which government and public establishments have occasional recourse, either to fulfil subsidiary treaties, or to procure the importation of bullion and specie, or to effect a rise or fall in exchanges.”

As an instance of a speculation of the latter kind, Mr. D. gives a very interesting account of an operation by which Spain was enabled to discharge her subsidy to the French government in the year 1804, at a time when the resources of that peninsula had, by epidemical disease, famine, a paralized commerce, and the non-arrival of the expected galleons from America, been reduced to the lowest ebb of insolvency, and when the modern Attila, unmoved by such accumulated distress, sternly insisted on the immediate payment of his tribute. In this dilemma French ingenuity, which has perfected the art of rapine and plunder into a system, was not deficient in expedients. An exchange circulation, in which London itself acted a prominent part, was forthwith set on foot between the principal commercial cities in Europe, whose wealthy merchants supported the operation with their capital and credit. Bills were drawn from one place on a second, from a second on a third, and so on. For these bills France obtained present cash, while the period consumed by their circulation enabled Spain to await the arrival of bullion from her colonies, and thereby to appropriate in time sufficient funds for the discharge of the debt afloat; an object which appears to have been attained in the end with even considerable advantage to Spain.

In the second volume Mr. D. proceeds to the operations of specie and bullion. The examples given under this head, embracing not only the principal gold and silver coins of every country, but also the mode of estimating those metals in bars, are copious and clear. His definition and illustration of Par of Exchange, an expression so frequently used and so little understood by many merchants themselves, are at once novel, correct, and intelligible to any reader of common sense. A separate chapter on practical speculations in merchandize is next introduced, and immediately followed by the important subject of monies, weights, and measures, alphabetically arranged according to the names of the countries and places which have any pretensions to mercantile notice. The republican innovations in the monies, coins, weights, and measures of France, are here fully explained under their proper heads; and other modern changes relating to this subject, are duly noticed in their respective places. Eleven voluminous tables are added, exhibiting at one view the comparative proportions between the monies of exchange, coins, measures, and weights of foreign countries, and those of England. And