Excerpt from Select Tracts and Documents Illustrative of English Monetary History, 1626-1730: Comprising Works of Sir Robert Cotton, Henry Robinson, Sir Richard Temple and J. S., Sir Isaac Newton, John ConduittThe general principles of the imperfect mechan ism by which seventeenth century governments attempted to'cope with the currency difficulty whichbeset them, are illustrated more fully in the intro duction to the first section (pages 2 to After vain attempts. At restricting the activity of exchange merchants and the use of bills of exchange, and that by means of such institutions as the Giro Bank and the Exchange Bank, of which latter the Amsterdam Bank was the fullest seventeenth century expression, the governments of Europe came uniformly to the opinion that the only way to stop the secret traffic in coin was to mate the merchant in his own craft, to cut away the basis of his trade by altering mint and exchange terms so as to deprive him of his profit.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.