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All the old stars were setting. Even Madame, who survived the King by seven years, began to feel certain infirmities. Advancing age, though it mellowed her manner, did not change her outlook. To the last day of her life she retained" the grace of a German heart" and the conviction that there was but one people under heaven deserving of love and respect. Her last years were far from unhappy for, though the King's death was a real sorrow to her, she took great pride and interest in the fact that her son was ruler of the realm.

Even "perfekt "health comes to an end. Liselotte, one May day in 1722, complained of feeling ill. Immediately she was bled and the wound was done up so badly that she suffered two involuntary hæmorrhages. After this experience she seemed to go steadily downhill. A journey to Rheims in October, to assist at the coronation of the boy king, Louis XV, proved very exhausting and it was a resigned and unnaturally gentle person who said good-bye to the world in December, at St. Cloud.

She did not know that her letters would make her immortal, or that the remedy she adopted for nostalgia would prove her fame. No pictures of life at the French Court are more vivid and artless than hers. It is a constant amusement to dip into them. Of necessity the editor and translator of Madame's letters into English has omitted much that appears in larger editions, but she has selected the essential missives and the work is done with care and skill, but without the love put into the small German edition with its sub-title "Briefe der Liselotte." The editor of this unpretentious admirable volume tells us that he has spent sixteen years in selecting the best letters out of the 3,900 available. He knows his Duchess inside-out as only a fellow-countryman could do, and cherishes for her a devotion which historical personages rarely evoke in the breasts of their biographers. Whether any English editor could wax eloquent over a woman who said that nowhere in the world could such strange wicked people be found as in England is open to question. Liselotte's opinion, founded on hearsay and an occasional talk with some one of our ambassadors to the French Court, was that the English were worth "just nothing at all."

UNA POPE-HENNESSY

A

COINAGE AND WAR DEBTS IN THE

ROMAN REPUBLIC

SEASON of droughts or deluges is likely to awaken in the

least curious an interest in the causes that determine the weather. In somewhat similar fashion the violent fluctuations of values, that may follow a great war, invite many who are not political economists to inquire into the principles that govern our systems of exchange. In the last few years we have seen German mark, Russian rouble and Austrian krone plunge into the abyss; we are still watching the French franc gliding down the perilous descent; even in England we have experienced rises and falls of value, which can only be called moderate in comparison with extreme examples abroad. It would be strange if we had no curiosity about the causes of happenings that so nearly affect our lives. If we appeal to the professional economists we must face difficult theorising and the proverbial disagreements of the experts. The director of a great bank may say one thing, the university professor another. There is something to be said for a direct appeal to the sources from which all theories must ultimately be derived-the past experience of nations during similar crises.

The experience which I propose to examine in this paper is that of the Roman Republic-far removed from us in time, but not so far in the actual nature of its problems. Such a study has some advantages of its own. We can examine it with less prejudice than we can modern conditions. There is evidence enough to determine the main course of events, but not enough to confuse us with a weight of detailed knowledge.* There is little in the way of theories to complicate the issues; we shall find practical problems handled in a practical manner. From such a study we

*The view of the Roman coinage, developed below, will not of course be accepted by all scholars in all its details. It is, however, based on a faithful following of ancient authorities, and reinforced by a careful study of the evidence of the coins. Some points in it, which might have seemed improbable to us before the Great War, will hardly cause difficulty after that experience.

may hope to gain some hints and conceptions that will enable us to face our own problems with a clearer understanding.

A complete study of the coinage of the Roman Republic would outrun the limits of a single paper. A general sketch will be necessary to supply the materials we have to work upon, but beyond that we must confine ourselves to a study of a few points, where coinage most nearly touches the general life of the State-more particularly the question of inflation or deflation and the treatment of such exceptional burdens as the expenses of a great war.

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Until a date not far from B.C. 300 the Romans, like most of the Italian peoples, were in the state that the Greeks called 'barbarism." Gold and silver were known as rare articles of luxury, not of common use. The memory of an original system of valuation in terms of oxen and sheep was still fresh; the Latin word for money, pecunia, was derived from pecus (head of cattle). Bronze was plentiful, and the pound of bronze (the as or unit) was the chief measure of value; but there was as yet no coin in the strict sense. Bronze circulated in the form of lumps of irregular shape and weight, the so-called "rough bronze," or aes rude, bearing no type or legend. The archæological evidence absolutely confirms the picture given by historians of Rome's primitive thrift and poverty-a picture in which we might otherwise have suspected exaggeration.

The organization of the State was simple. The powers of the sovereign people were actually wielded by the great advisory council-the Senate; the magistrates seldom tried to assert their powers against the authority of a body to which they themselves belonged. Finance was controlled by the Senate, but there was no permanent Chancellor of the Exchequer, no regular annual budget. Only once in every five years were censors appointed, who dealt with the public revenues from such sources as public land and with the public expenditure on such charges as roads or repairs of buildings. The State treasury, the ærarium Saturni, was under the charge of junior magistrates-the quæstors. The expenses of war were met partly by special requisitioning, partly by the war-tax, or tributum. A tax on the manumission of slaves fed a special reserve fund. The senatorial aristocracy was composed simply of the larger landowners; the primitive economic conditions precluded the growth of large business or banking interests.

The first advance was made under the pressure of the great Samnite Wars-though probably not till the crisis was safely past and Rome, secure on land, was beginning to look seawards for expansion. In place of the aes rude, coins were cast, representing the as, or pound, and its parts from semis (the half) to uncia (the twelfth), with heads of deities on the obverse, and on the reverse one unvarying type, the prow of a ship. Other Italian States in the north, the centre and the east of Italy, soon followed the Roman lead. A first step had been taken towards the acquirement of the art of coinage, which Greeks or Lydians had invented nearly four centuries earlier, and which, for more than two centuries, had been in use in the Greek cities of the south and even in Etruria.

The second step followed quickly on the first. Tarentum, the leader of the Greek south, came into collision with the rising power of Rome, and called in to her aid the brilliant general Pyrrhus, King of Epirus. The tenacity and rude valour of the Roman triumphed over the military science of the Greek, and Rome stood unchallenged as the sovereign power in Italy. For this great war, conducted mainly in the south, where silver coinage was familiar, the clumsy system of Roman bronze coinage proved inadequate. Rome learned to strike silver in the denomination most familiar in the south, the didrachm, and with it a bronze coinage subsidiary to the silver. Even during the war a reduction of the weight of this didrachm bears witness to the financial stress. The next step, which was not long delayed, was to introduce in Rome itself, a silver coinage beside the heavy bronze. As early as B.C. 268 the famous Roman silver denarius was struck, with its half and fourth, the quinarius and sestertius. Rome had been slow to begin, but she was learning the lesson fast.

The Pyrrhic War must have involved very heavy expenditure and have left a legacy of debt. Rome met the situation by inflation of the coinage. The bronze as of one pound continued to be the unit of reckoning; but, as a coin, it was now represented by a piece of less than five ounces. The new silver coinage was put on the market at a value far in excess of its market rate. In Sicily and South Italy the Greeks had ingeniously harmonized their own silver with the indigenous bronze coinage, by dividing their large silver unit, the didrachm, into ten small silver units, librae (or pounds), each equal in value to a pound of bronze. On

precisely the same principle the Roman denarius was a "tenpiece," containing ten smaller parts which, as our authorities definitely tell us, were equal to pounds of bronze. But the denarius weighed only just over 70 grains, as against the 100 or so grains of the lightest didrachm. This in itself is enough to show that the ratio of silver to bronze in this coinage, I to 720, could not be the market rate, even in those early days when silver was, no doubt, rare and valuable at Rome. The denarius was, in fact, deliberately over-tariffed in terms of bronze and used, beside the reduced as, as a second measure of inflation.

Creditors must often have asked themselves in those years whether the as would ever recover its nominal value of a poundwhether in fact they would receive payment in full. A decisive answer-in the negative-was soon given by the outbreak of the first Punic War. This struggle, which barely after twenty years led to a decision in favour of Rome, exhausted the Roman Treasury and left the State bankrupt. No levying of war-tax could meet the acute need. The as, far from recovering weight, fell steadily from just under five ounces to a little above two, and was finally stabilised at the value of two-the so-called "sextantal" reduction. Since the as was the unit of reckoning, this meant nothing less than a reduction of all debts by five-sixths of their total value if the franc were stabilised to-day at 150 to the pound sterling, we should have an exact modern parallel. As a matter of fact, of course, the loss was gradual; but the new stabilisation finally shut off any hopes that creditors may have cherished of an eventual payment in full.

The silver coinage was not touched: it was neither reduced in weight nor retariffed in terms of bronze. The denarius had never been really worth ten asses of a pound weight; after a possible decline in market value it was actually worth ten asses of two ounces each. We see at once why the depreciation of the as stopped just where it did. A further reduction would have upset the relation of as and denarius and have necessitated a complete reorganization of the system. The bronze coinage concerned only Rome and her closer circle of influence; the denarius and the didrachm-equal in value to a denarius and a-half, and still struck by Rome in south Italy-were involved in foreign payments and could not be so readily altered. Rome, then, by deliberate inflation, solved the problem of her internal

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