CHAP. XXIII.
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the year 1825, when the panic in the commercialworld created a great drain, and dispersed thelarger portion of it. The experiments we are nowconsidering were conducted one year after thatpanic, and though some of the gold coins uponwhich they were made may have been coined nineyears before, they may not have been in cir-culation more than a year or two.
It would scarcely be an unfair mode of calcu-lation to presume that the general mass of goldin circulation in December, 1826, when this ex-periment had been tried, had not circulated morethan two years, or two years and a half on theaverage. If we take the average wear on the threedates of 1817, 1821, and 1825 to have been ofthree years and a half, eight shillings and ten-pence per cent, will be the loss in that time, orabout one pound four shillings per cent, in tenyears. This would show a loss on that gold coinat the rate of one part in eight hundred yearly.
The report of the experiment of the mint doesnot seem to be such as can be satisfactorily ap-plied to general circumstances, not from any wantof accuracy, but from the peculiar period in whichit was made; when the whole of our monetarysystem was passing through a crisis which ren-dered it unfit to become a scale for the measure-ment of the loss which in other times and countriesoccurs by the wear of gold.
Any scale that can be framed must, however,
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VOL. II.