No one wants the pound decimalised except a few decimal unpractical persons. A properly taught schoolboy adds up sums of money duodecimally for the pence, decimally for the shillings, converting these by twenties into pounds. It is quite easy to add up a column of pence thus: 8 and 5, 1_s._ 3_d._; and 10, 2_s._ 1_d._; and 8, 2_s._ 9_d._; and 5, 3_s._ 2_d._ With the shillings column the units are put down and the tens carried to the column of tens; an odd 1 is put down and half the remainder carried to the column of pounds.
English silver coins are 37/40 = 0·925 fine, i.e. 11 oz. 2 dwt. of the now obsolete 12 oz. mint-pound.
French five-franc pieces are at 0·900, other silver coins are 0·835 fine.
Of the two precious metals, only one can be the standard of value. In a gold-standard country, as England has been since 1816, the golden sovereign of lawful weight is the standard of value. As the price of silver, like that of every other commodity, varies with demand and supply, it would be futile to attempt to make silver coins correspond in actual metal value to gold coins; especially as, since the great fall in the price of silver from its demonetisation in many countries and its large production, silver coins are really tokens; tokens of value, but still tokens, not legal tender above a certain amount. A shilling melted down is only worth fivepence or less; while sovereigns melted down can be exchanged, at a trifling charge, for their weight in minted gold.
In silver-standard countries it is gold which varies in price. Thus in India, where for centuries the standard of value has been the silver rupee now weighing 180 grains and worth fifty years ago a little over two shillings, gold coins of the same weight called ‘mohurs’ were current at market price, about 16 rupees more or less. Sovereigns were worth about 10 rupees in 1860; they would exchange now for double that price did not the Government of India, by restricting silver coinage and other legitimate devices, keep the gold price of the rupee at about 1_s._ 4_d._, so that 15 rupees will buy a sovereign for transactions with England and other gold-standard countries.
Gold was coined in ancient Rome. The gold solidus or aureus of Constantine was 1/72 of an As or mint-pound; so that it weighed 70·14 grains. It was called ‘solidus,’ entire, as distinguished from the semissis and tremissis, its half and third. The original French sol, or shilling, was an ‘entire’ of 12 deniers; hence the £ _s._ _d._ we use were once the current signs, in France and elsewhere, for libræ, solidi, denarii.
