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Show The World's Coinage Muddle. Twenty-6ix different monetary units are used by the forty-eight principal countries of the world. Thus Great Britain uses the sovereign or pound sterling: France and six other countries of Europe use a unit equal to the franc; and Conada and the United States use the dollar. In value these different urits rsino from 4.4 to 494.33 cents of money of fie United States. They are ico-csentl in their turn by coins the value of whicn are ither multiples or fractional pa.-ts of the value of their own chief 'inks: and there are no doubt at least 200 such different coins, not on.? of which seems to have a value equal to that of any commonlv known unit o' weight, as the gram, for example, or the ounce of gold, although forty-ihre of these forty-eight countries have accepted gold as their standard nie.isuro of values. This lack of logical reliiioi of coins to any widely used unit of weight of the precious metals mav be d-i? to the fact that money systems seem to have grown up han-hazard. under diverge conditions of life, in different rarts of the world. Such diversity in moneys may have been of little moment when millions .f people spent their lives knowing ru, thing th-ing of the existence of other minions and there was little traffic; but these differences in monetary units ar of importance im-portance now that international commerce com-merce includes millions of tons of the toil of all hands, and billions of dollars each year to settle its bills-for bills-for such differences put unon trad. a wholly unnecessary tax. No account is made here of the burden laid on domestic do-mestic trade by like variation in the value of such units at home, as of the tael of China, which has sixteen different dif-ferent values within that empire. 13 W. Perry in Moody's Magazine. |
