ARE OUR COINS WEARING AWAY?
After the recent speech by the Chancellor of the Exchequer in which he showed that our gold coins are much lighter than they ought to be, we shall have to answer the above question in the affirmative. Our coins are wearing away, and although not at any very alarming rate, yet at a perceptible one. Every sovereign, half-sovereign, half-crown, florin, shilling, or sixpence, &c., which has been out of the Mint any length of time, weighs less now than it did when brand new. Indeed, in some old coins this is quite evident upon a casual inspection, for the image may be worn flat and unrecognisable, and the superscription may be illegible. Now, the difference in value between this old coin and the same coin when turned out new may be very trifling; but when we consider that there are probably millions in circulation which have similarly suffered depreciation to a greater or less extent, and that this loss will at some time or other have to be made good, this question of the wear of our coins becomes of sufficient importance for a Chancellor of the Exchequer to seek to cope with it. We shall here only offer a few observations on the mechanical aspects of the subject.
The office youth fetching a bag of gold from the bank to pay wages with—the workman putting his small share into his pocket after the lot has been shot on to a desk and his money has been duly apportioned to him—the shopman banging it on his counter to see whether it is sound when it is tendered in payment for groceries, &c., are all participators in a gigantic system of unintentional ‘sweating.’ Under this usage—quite inseparable, by the way, from the functions the coinage has to subserve—it would appear that in the United Kingdom alone there is something like seven hundred and ten thousand pounds-worth of gold-dust floating about, widely distributed, and in microscopic particles, lost to the nation—dust which has been abraded from the gold coins now in circulation. There are similarly thousands of pounds-worth of silver particles from our silver coinage worn off in the same way.
It has been estimated from exact data that a hundred-year-old sovereign has lost weight equivalent to a depreciation of eightpence; in other words, that such a sovereign is only of the intrinsic value of nineteen shillings and fourpence. There has been a hundred years of wear for eightpence—as cheap, one would think, as one could possibly get so much use out of a coin for; but as we shall now see, we have, comparatively speaking, to pay more for the use of other coins. Thus, for a hundred years of use of a half-sovereign we pay a small fraction under eightpence; in other words, the half-sovereign has lost nearly as much weight as the sovereign; and considering its value, it has therefore cost the nation nearly twice as much for its use, two half-sovereigns costing us nearly one shilling and fourpence. It appears from Mr Childers’s statement that at the present time, taking old and new coins, there are in the United Kingdom ninety million sovereigns in circulation; and of these, fifty millions are on the average worth nineteen shillings and ninepence-halfpenny each. Of the forty million half-sovereigns in circulation, some twenty-two millions are of the intrinsic value of nine shillings and ninepence three-farthings each. Hence the proposal of the Chancellor of the Exchequer to issue, instead of half-sovereigns, ten-shilling pieces, or tokens, containing only nine shillings-worth of gold, with the idea of making up for the loss by waste of the gold coins now in circulation.
Now, if we inquire into the reason why the half-sovereign wastes so much faster than the sovereign, we can only come to the conclusion that, being of half the value, it is a more convenient coin than the sovereign, and consequently has a much busier life. This applies with greater force still to coins like the half-crown, shilling, and sixpence, which are only one-eighth, one-twentieth, and one-fortieth respectively of the value of a sovereign. And we find upon examination, what one would naturally expect, that the silver coinage is even more costly than the gold coinage. The depreciation of the half-crown, reckoned in terms of itself, is more than double that of the half-sovereign; that is, if a half-sovereign wastes in the course of a century to the extent of one-fifteenth of its value, the half-crown will waste more than two-fifteenths of its value. The depreciation of shilling-pieces is not far off three times as much as that of half-crowns; and sixpences waste faster than shillings, though by no means twice so fast. There is thus an immense waste of our silver coinage taking place, and it proceeds at such a rate in the case of sixpences, that the intrinsic value of one a hundred years old would be only threepence, a century of use having worn away half the silver.
It is evident from these facts that the relative amounts of wear of coins are not so much owing to the nature of the metal they are made of as to the activity of the life they have to lead. The less the value of the coin, the greater is the use to which it is put; and consequently, the greater is the depreciation in its value from wear in a given time. The sovereign being of greatest value, is used least, and depreciates the least—a circumstance quite in accordance with the fitness of things when we reflect that it is ‘really an international coin, largely used in exchange operations, known to the whole commercial world,’ and that any heavy depreciation of it would lead to much embarrassment.