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THE NATURE AND CAUSES OF

silver coin had thus degraded them four per cent, below thevalue of that coin. The same act of parliament which sup-pressed ten and five shilling bank notes, suppressed likewisethis optional clause, and thereby restored the exchange be-tween England and Scotland to its natural rate, or to whatthe course of trade and remittances might happen to make it.

In the paper currencies of Yorkshire , the payment of sosmall a sum as a sixpence sometimes depended upon the con-dition that the holder of the note should bring the change ofa guinea to the person who issued it; a condition which theholders of such notes might frequently find it very difficultto fulfil, and which must have degraded this currency belowthe value of gold and silver money. An act of parliament,accordingly, declared all such clauses unlawful, and sup-pressed, in the same manner as in Scotland , all promissorynotes, payable to the bearer, under twenty shillings value.

The paper currencies of North America consisted, not inbank notes payable to the bearer on demand, but in a go-vernment paper, of whieh the payment was not exigible tillseveral years after it was issued: and though the colony go-vernments paid no interest to the holders of this paper, theydeclared it to be, and in fact rendered it, a legal tender ofpayment for the full value for which it was issued. But al-lowing the colony security to be perfectly good, a hundredpounds payable fifteen years hence, for example, in a countrywhere interest is at six per cent, is worth little more thanforty pounds ready money. To oblige a creditor, therefore,to accept of this as full payment for a debt of a hundredpounds actually paid down in ready money, was an act ofsuch violent injustice, as lias scarce, perhaps, been attemptedby the government of any other country which pretended tobe free. It bears the evident, marks of having oriirinally beenwhat the honest and downright Doctor Douglas assures us itwas, a scheme of fraudulent debtors to cheat their creditors.The government of Pennsylvania , indeed, pretended, upontheir first emission of paper money, in 1722, to render theirpaper of equal value with gold and silver,by enacting penal-ties against all those who made any difference in the price oftheir goods when they sold them for a colony paper, andwhen they sold them for gold and silver; a regulation equallytyrannical, but much less effectual than that which it wasmeant to support. A positive law may render a shilling alegal tender for a guinea ; because it may direct the courts of