The king then controlled, as for instance in England, the mintage. If the sovereign thought fit to reduce the amount of silver in the groat from 80 to 72 grains his subjects had no alternative but to take the new and lighter pieces as equivalent to four pennies sterling. The sovereign thus was able to relieve an exhausted treasury, making a considerable profit off every groat and penny put into circulation. Again, the impecunious monarch might resort to another method of making a profit, by debasing the coinage, and might issue one such as the fourth of Henry VIII., of exceeding base silver, and again his subjects could simply grumble and take the new money. These groats and pennies passed as such within the realm, but when the question of foreign exchange came, the matter assumed an entirely new complexion. Would a shrewd Flemish merchant from Antwerp accept a base or a reduced English groat at the same rate for which it passed current in England? Of course he did no such thing, and the scales were at once called into use, and the silver changed hands not by tale, but by weight. Now the condition under which such a degradation or debasing of the coinage as we have described can take place is that a state or country shall be of such considerable magnitude that it has room within its own borders to employ a large amount of coin in internal trade without much necessity of external commerce. Did such conditions exist among the Greek states of antiquity? There is another condition, namely, sovereign power vested in the hands of a monarch possessed of unlimited authority, who has a direct personal interest in the profit to be made from the degradation of the coinage, and who has power sufficient to enable him to force his debased coinage on a reluctant people. Did such conditions exist in any of the Greek states of antiquity? Nowhere in Greece Proper do we find them fulfilled, but if we turn to Sicily we get a good example of the practice so often followed in after centuries by the mediaeval monarchs. The tyrant Dionysius there put an arbitrary value on gold in relation to silver: for although this relation was probably not more than 12:1, this despot raised it perforce to 15:1[1]. He
- ↑ Head, Coinage of Syracuse, p. 71.
