WORKMEN FIND AN INTERESTING COIN.
Workmen who were digging in Congress Street [Boston] the other day found an interesting old coin which is said by experts to link the records of Boston currency nearly two centuries ago with a mintage controversy that stirred even the phlegmatic George III, and elicited some of the most famous witticisms of Dean Swift and dignified declarations of Sir Isaac Newton. It is about one third larger than an American quarter and has on the obverse side an idealized head of George III, in the center, surrounded with the words “Georgius Deo Gratia Rex.” Perhaps the intrinsic interest is in the reverse side, which has in the center a symbolic figure of Ireland, bearing a harp, and on the border is stamped “Hibernia—1723.” The first anomaly in this is that, although it was on its face an Irish coin, it was neither coined nor circulated in that country, but, owing to indignant protests of Irish dealers, crystallized by the sarcasms of that witty divine, Dean Swift, it was shipped over to Boston, where it circulated as the “colonial half-penny.” In the old country it was called the “Woods half-penny,” on account of its coinage by a Londoner of that name. This was the chief element of grievance, as Ireland was then approaching the time when the aspiration of a Grattan were to find realization, and Swift argued in his famous Drapier letters that the country should not have these foreign and false coins passed upon it.—(Boston Transcript, October 12, 1895.)