214 THE EVOLUTION OF 



rulers. But so vital is the constant value of the currency 

 or coinage to the daily welfare of all communities that 

 no amount of trickery and no amount of force can 

 permanently affect the value put on the quality of the 

 medium of exchange. There is one thing that a smart 

 mercantile body or an autocrat or tyrant cannot do. 

 They cannot permanently alter the quality or weight, 

 i.e. the exchange value of the medium of exchange. 

 As soon as they are found out their money ' falls,' as we 

 say, to its intrinsic value. Close and clever imitations 

 of the very valuable blue Popo beads of West Africa, which 

 are probably made of beryl or aquamarine, have never 

 yet been passed for true ones on the savages there. 

 In the seventeenth century smart Chinese merchants 

 imposed very debased, but bright silvery, spelter coins of 

 exceedingly low value, which we call ' cash/ on the 

 unsuspecting Malays, but when the trick was discovered 

 their value went down to a thirty-thousandth part, 

 i.e. to practically nothing, showing the result of playing 

 with currency when dealing with the semi-civilized. It 

 has never recovered since beyond the hundredth part, 

 as its name sapeque in French still implies. In the East 

 in the same way constant and continuous royal debase- 

 ment has caused denominations to decrease steadily even 

 to a thousandth part of their original value. The 

 mahmudi is an instance, receding from ^4 to a penny in 

 say six hundred years. The East India Company in the 

 eighteenth century tried to introduce a gold mohur 

 containing fifteen annas in gold for the value of sixteen 

 annas with a complete want of success. Oriental and 

 other autocratic kings have repeatedly tried at the point 

 of the sword to force a debased coinage on their subjects, 

 but have never succeeded. In Burma the apparently 

 irresistible old autocrat, Bodawgyi, a hundred years ago, 



