THE WEALTH OF NATIONS.

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most a hundred thousand pounds. But when the coin is de-graded below its standard weight, the annual coinage must,besides this, till up the large vacuities which exportation andthe melting pot are continually making in the current coin.It was upon this account that during the ten or twelve yearsimmediately preceding the late reformation of the gold coin,the annual coinage amounted at an average to more thaneight hundred and fifty thousand pounds. But if therehad been a seignorage of four or five percent, upon the goldcoin, it, would probably, even in the state in which thingsthen were, have put an effectual stop to the business both ofexportation and of the melting pot. The bank, instead oflosing every year about two and a half per cent, upon thebullion which was to be coined into more than eight hundredand fifty thousand pounds, or incurring an annual loss ofmore than twenty-one thousand two hundred and fifty pounds,would not probably have incurred the tenth partof that loss.

The revenue allotted by parliament for defraying the ex-pense of the coinage is but fourteen thousand pounds a year,and the real expense which it costs the government, or thefees of the officers of the mint, do not, upon ordinary occa-sions, I am assured, exceed the half of that sum. The savingof so very small a sum, or even the gaining of another whichcould not well be much larger, are objects too inconsiderable,it may be thought, to deserve the serious attention of govern-ment. But the saving of eighteen or twenty thousand poundsa year in case of an event which is not improbable, which hasfrequently happened before, and which is very likely to hap-pen again, is surely an object which well deserves the seriousattention even of so great a company as the bank of England.

Some of the foregoing reasonings and observations mightperhaps have been more properly placed in those chapters ofthe first book which treat of the origin and use of money, and ofthe difference between the real and the nominal price of com-modities. But as the law for the encouragement of coinagederives its origin from those vulgar prejudices which havebeen introduced by the mercantile system, I judged it morepioper to reserve them for this chapter. Nothing could bemore agreeable to the spirit of that system than a sortof bountyu pon the production of money, the very thing which, it sup-poses, constitutes the wealth of every nation. It is one of itsmany admirable expedients for enriching the country.