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• Lecture I.: Transmission of the Precious Metals From Country to Country.
• Lecture II.: Mercantile Theory of Wealth.
• Lecture III.: Mercantile Theory of Wealth Concluded.

LECTURE I.

TRANSMISSION OF THE PRECIOUS METALS FROM COUNTRY TO COUNTRY.

I propose, in the present Lecture, to consider the effect of the actual transmission of the precious metals from one country to another. An inquiry peculiarly interesting at present, as it leads to conclusions decisive of the controversy now eagerly maintained on Free Trade. The argument runs generally in the following form.

The advocate of freedom dwells on the benefit of making full use of our own peculiar advantages of situation, wealth, and skill, and availing ourselves to the utmost of those possessed by our neighbours. He asks whether we should act wisely, if we were to declare ourselves independent of foreigners for wine, to devote our mineral treasures, and our industry, to the forcing of grapes for the production of home-made port and claret, and discontinue the manufacture of cottons and woollens for the markets of Oporto and Bourdeaux? And he urges that the same absurdity in kind belongs to every protecting duty and prohibition. He observes, in the words of Adam Smith,* that it is the maxim of every prudent master of a family, never to make at home, what it will cost him more to make than to buy. The tailor does not make his own shoes, but buys them of the shoemaker. The shoemaker does not make his own clothes, but buys them of the tailor. The farmer attempts to make neither the one nor the other, but employs those different artificers. All of them find it their interest to employ their whole industry in a way in which they have some advantage over their neighbours, and to purchase, with a part of its produce, whatever else they have occasion for. And he infers, that what is prudence, in the conduct of every private family, can scarcely be folly in that of a great kingdom.

The advocate of restriction and prohibition admits, that if the interests of the consumers were alone to be considered, the law ought not to force the production at home, of what can be obtained better, or more cheaply, from abroad. But he urges, that the opulence of the whole community is best promoted by encouraging its domestic industry. And that the industry of each class of producers is best encouraged by giving them the command of the home market, undisturbed by foreign competition.

His opponent replies, that it is impossible to encourage the industry of one class of producers, by means of commercial restrictions, without discouraging, to an equal degree, the exertions of others. That every prohibition of importation is a prohibition of exportation. That every restriction on the importation of French silks is a restriction on the exportation of those articles with which those silks would have been purchased. That if it benefit the English silk manufacturer, it injures, to at least an equal amount in the whole, though the injury is less perceptible, because more widely diffused, the cotton-spinner, the cutler, or the clothier. That the whole body of producers, therefore, as an aggregate, suffer in their capacity of consumers without compensation.

The really candid defender of restriction (and I am inclined to think that such persons do exist) admits, perhaps, the force of this argument, as applied to nations willing to take in exchange our commodities. To them he is willing to open our market on a footing, as he calls it, of reciprocity. But he urges, that there are many who refuse our commodities; and, while they persist in this ungrateful refusal, he retaliates by not accepting theirs.

The advocate of free trade replies, that the benefit of commerce consists, not in what is given, but in what is received: that if the foreigner refuse to accept our commodities, he must either refuse us his own, or give them to us for nothing; that, in the first case, the abolition of commercial restrictions can produce no evil, in the second, it must produce a manifest good.

He would do neither, replies his adversary, he would deluge us with his goods, and receive payment for them in our money.

The dispute which I have supposed, and which corresponds, step by step, with almost all those which I have witnessed on this question, coincides at this point with the subject of the present Lecture. And, quitting my imaginary opponent and respondent, I proceed to consider the effect of the transmission of the precious metals from one country to another.

I will suppose that all the protecting duties, with which we have clogged our commerce with France, are suddenly removed, and that the removal is immediately followed by an increased importation of French commodities to the amount of five millions sterling. And I will suppose the commercial restrictions on the part of France (and she is at least our equal in protecting her own industry by interfering with its natural direction) to remain unaltered. I will suppose, too, that the five millions in question are actually remitted in money.

It must be admitted that the efflux of so large a sum from England, and its influx into France, must sink all English prices, and occasion a general rise of prices in France. Indeed, if it did not, the transaction would be one of pure benefit to England, and of pure loss to France. As money is not a source of gratification, but a mere instrument of commerce, if our prices were not affected by parting with a portion of our money, we should be insensible of our loss; or rather we should have sustained no loss whatever, and have gained the five millions’ worth of French commodities without any real sacrifice, while France would have parted with those commodities, and received no sensible equivalent.

But those who fear that a nation may be injured by parting with its money, are certainly right in supposing that the transmission of five millions in specie from England to France, would occasion a general fall of prices in England, and a general rise in France. The steps, by which these effects would be produced in each country, cannot properly be stated in this part of my Lectures, but I suppose there is no one present who doubts that such would be the case.

The consequences would be an immediate and universal increase of imports, and diminution of exports, in France, and an immediate and universal increase of exports, and diminution of imports, in England. The commerce, which any country carries on with its neighbours, must depend on the prices of their respective exportable commodities. When commodities of the same quality, or which may be substitutes for one another, can be imported from different quarters, a slight variation of price will decide which shall be preferred. If linen of the same quality can be imported into South America indifferently from Germany and from France, and the cost of transport from each country is the same, while the price per yard is also the same, South America will probably import indifferently from each country; but, if the influx of money should raise the price of linen of a given quality from two shillings to two shillings and a farthing per yard in France, while it remained at two shillings in Germany, South America would instantly desert the French market, and confine her linen trade to Germany.

With every commercial rival, with whom France was formerly on a par, she would now be at a disadvantage, and many would now meet her in markets from which she had formerly excluded them. The same consequences, though to a less extent, would follow, even in the cases in which France had exclusive powers of production. Every commodity has among its purchasers some whose desire for it, or at least for that variable quantity of it which they consume, induces them to spend on it a given portion of their income, and no more. On the slightest rise of price they either discontinue, or diminish their consumption. A very slight rise in the price of claret would occasion some to drink less, and others to drink none. Precisely the same causes which would diminish the exports of France, would increase her imports. However earnestly a nation may endeavour to secure to its own productive classes the monopoly in what they respectively produce, it cannot really protect them against foreign competition by any measure short of the prohibition of all foreign commerce. The consumer cannot be forced to buy the dearer or inferior home-made article. If he is prohibited from importing precisely what he wants, he may still make his purchase abroad. The increased price in France of all home commodities would, of course, stimulate the consumption of foreign ones. The bills on France in other countries would increase, those on other countries in France would diminish, and the exchange would be against France throughout the commercial world. It is impossible that, under such circumstances, she could retain for a month the five millions which I have supposed to have been paid to her. They would flow from her in every direction.

In fact, until she parted with the money, France would have derived not benefit, but rather evil, from her export to England. That money is a means, not an end; that no gratification is afforded by an increase in the quantity necessary to effect a given purpose; that it is just as pleasant to purchase a given commodity for five shillings as for fifty, are truisms, but truisms so often impliedly denied, that they cannot be too often repeated. The rise of prices in France, while it lasted, must have been an evil. It must have deranged, so far as it went, the existing relations of society, have impoverished creditors, and those whose incomes were fixed, and, to a certain extent, unfitted money to perform its function of a permanent expression or standard of value. If no other results were to have followed from the sacrifice of so much French industry, France had better have given away than have sold her five millions’ worth of silks. The sale of the silks would become advantageous to her only, when, by re-exporting their price, she had obtained from other countries commodities capable of affording her more gratification than she could have derived from the industry of the silk-manufacturers, if she had employed them in manufacturing silks, or other commodities, for her own home market.

It is obvious that all this time precisely an opposite process would be going on in England. The general fall in English prices would give a preference to our goods in every market of which they had merely an equal participation before: it would admit them to many others from which they were previously excluded. It would exclude from the English market many foreign commodities, which could now be obtained more cheaply at home. While the bills in England on foreign countries were increasing, the foreign bills on England would diminish, the exchange would be in our favour with the whole world, and the five millions would come back as rapidly as they went out. To suppose that the level of the precious metals in the commercial world can be permanently disturbed by taking money from one country to another, is as absurd as to suppose that the level of a pond can be altered by taking a bucket-full from one place, and pouring it in at another. The water instantly rushes to the place from which the bucket-full has been drawn, just as it rushes from the place into which it has been poured. Every country to which France exported any of the money she received from England would, to that extent, have more money than her habitual state of prices could allow. It would flow from her either directly to England, or to those countries which were in want of money in consequence of having previously exported it to England.

It appears therefore, that even in the extravagant case which I have supposed of an export of five millions in money, the loss, if it can be called one, would be immediately repaired. The only inconvenience that we should suffer from the refusal of France to take our cottons and our hardware in return for her silks, would be that instead of the direct exchange of English for French commodities, we should give to France money; France would export that money to Germany, Holland and Russia; and Germany, Holland and Russia would return us that money in exchange for our manufactures; that our trade would in short be circuitous, instead of direct.

For the sake of illustration I have supposed a sudden and great transmission of money: effects the same in kind, though less in degree, would of course follow a more gradual one. If a balance of only 100,000 sovereigns a year were sent to France, similar consequences, though less palpable, would follow either immediately, or as soon as the annual efflux of money from the one country to the other amounted to a sufficient sum to affect the prices of either country, or of both.

It would appear, therefore, that the exchange between two countries can never long deviate from its commercial par.

There are, however, exceptions to this rule; some real, others merely nominal.

A nominal deviation from the par of exchange arises from the difficulty of changing mercantile language. The existing commercial par of exchange between London and Paris is about 25 francs 47½ centimes (say 25 francs and a half) for a sovereign. But should any of the data on which this par is calculated be changed, should the quantity of bullion contained in the money of either nation be altered without the denomination of the pieces being changed,—if we should, for instance, put only 56½ grains of pure gold instead of 113 into our gold pieces, and still call them sovereigns, or should the relative values of gold and silver alter, should silver exchange for ⅓ of its weight in gold instead of its present value, about 1/16th, it is clear that the par between the countries would be altered. In either case the real par would probably be only 12¾ francs for the sovereign, and this is the rate at which bills would be exchanged when the commerce of the two countries was in equilibrio. But if mercantile language were to remain unaltered, and 25 francs and a half for a sovereign were still called the par of exchange, it is clear that the ordinary rate of exchange between England and France would be 50 per cent. against England, and in favour of France; or, in other words, the real par of exchange would vary 50 per cent. from the nominal par. England would suffer no evil, and France would reap no advantage from this state of things, which would be merely the continuance of an obsolete nomenclature. The only inconvenience would be the chance of misleading subsequent writers on exchange, who might not be aware that during the period in question commercial language had misrepresented the facts of the case.

Again, the real exchange between two nations may be, and indeed must be, permanently unfavourable to the one, and consequently favourable to the other, if there be any cause which occasions the precious metals to flow constantly from the one to the other. This must be the case between the mining countries and those countries with which they maintain a direct intercourse. As the principal trade of Mexico is the production and exportation of silver, the value of silver, estimated in silver, must always be lower in Mexico than in the countries to which it has been exported from Mexico, just as it must always be lower at Real del Monte than at the door of the Mexican Mint, and lower at the Mint than at Vera Cruz. A partial result of the same kind must be produced in those countries through which the precious metals pass. Russia is one of the principal channels through which the precious metals pass from America to Asia. The real exchange must, therefore, be in general in her favour on her European frontier, by which she receives the metals, and against her on her Asiatic frontier, by which she exports them.

The mining countries are the only exception to the rule that no country can have an exchange permanently favourable or unfavourable, with the whole world. We have seen that a universal balance in favour of any country must soon so raise all her prices, as to exclude all her commodities from every foreign market, and to offer irresistible temptation to the introduction of foreign commodities into her own market. Instead of her stock of the precious metals increasing, it must diminish. A universal balance against any country must soon so exhaust her stock of the precious metals, and consequently lower her prices, as to diminish and gradually destroy her motives for purchasing foreign commodities, while it increased the motives of all other countries to purchase hers. To suppose that it is possible to go on for ever buying without selling, or selling without buying, or even buying more than you sell, or selling more than you buy, are all equally irrational.

But though no country except a mining country can have its exchange with all other countries permanently favourable or unfavourable, the tendency of every efflux of the precious metals to occasion a proportionate influx, has one exception; namely, the case of a nation in which the stock of money has become larger or smaller than is requisite to enable her prices to bear their natural proportion to those of the rest of the commercial world. The functions of money, as a measure and an expression of value, are incapable of being adequately supplied elsewhere: but the amount of money necessary to perform them bears a very small proportion to the transactions of the country. One million of sovereigns would in general be amply sufficient to perform these services in England. They are now effected in Scotland by a much smaller quantity. If a country have enough money to supply a measure and an expression of value, a substitute may be found for its third office, that of acting as a medium of exchange. It is obvious, indeed, that as money is a substitute for credit, credit must be a substitute for money; and it is well known that international commerce is carried on by means of bills of exchange, which are in fact merely an exchange of equal credits, with very little transmission of money. In a commercial country the actual intervention of money, except in very small payments, is avoided with almost equal success. It is probable that not one-thousandth of the daily exchanges in London, in which the value of the property on either side exceeds forty shillings, are performed by means of money, though in almost every one of them the terms are settled by a reference to money, or, to speak more correctly, in every one of them a sum of money, payable, but never actually paid, is one of the subjects of the exchange.

The obstacle to extensive transfers of credit consists in the difficulty of satisfying every successive vendor as to the circumstances and character of the person on whom the credit is tendered. This inconvenience is remedied by Bankers;—a class of persons who, having obtained general confidence themselves, let out to other persons the benefit of that confidence. One mode in which they do this is, by lending to their customers promissory notes, that is, scraps of paper containing promises on the part of the banker to pay, on demand, a given sum of money.

As long as the promise is believed, or, in other words, as long as the note is supposed to be convertible at pleasure into money, it performs the functions of money, and, as it is, unless for a very small value, more portable and less subject to loss or robbery, it is often preferred to money, and may circulate for many years, exchanged perhaps, on an average, every other day, and on every exchange effecting a new transfer of credit, until, when it has become too dirty and too ragged to be safely handled, payment is at last required from the banker.

The issuing of notes, however, is not the principal means by which bankers facilitate the transfer of credit. As soon as the use of promissory notes and bills of exchange, or, as they are usually termed, of paper credit, has become familiar, every individual, who deals much in money, finds it convenient to keep an account with a banker, and to make his payments by drafts or checks, that is, by written directions to his banker to make the payment. If the receiver of the draft make use of the same banker, he places it in his hands, and the draft is satisfied, without any intervention of money, by a transfer in the banker’s books. If he employ a different banker, the draft is still probably satisfied without the intervention of money, by periodical meetings of the different bankers, who, having each many drafts to receive and to pay, set them off against one another, and pay only the balance. It is calculated that payments are made at the clearing-house in Lombard Street to the amount of £4,500,000 sterling every day, and on some days to the amount of £13,000,000, and that the balance actually paid seldom exceeds £200,000. And even that balance is not paid in money, but in notes of the Bank of England.

When a nation has reached a high state of commercial improvement, when it possesses, in every district, banking establishments, enjoying perfect confidence, and the use of written orders and promises, or, in common language, of paper credit, has become familiar, the use of money as a medium of exchange may be entirely dispensed with, except for those small payments which are not worth the trouble of issuing a note or a draft. And if it can be dispensed with, we may be sure that it will be so. The use of money, as I have often said before, and shall often say again, for it cannot be too frequently repeated, affords no gratification. It is a troublesome and costly mode of supplying the deficiencies of barter, and is abandoned whenever those deficiencies can be supplied at less inconvenience or expense. “The gold and silver money,” observes Adam Smith, “which circulates in any country, may be compared to a highway, which, while it circulates and carries to market all the grass and corn of the country, produces itself not a single pile of either. The operations of banking, by providing a sort of waggon-way through the air, enable the country to convert, as it were, a great part of its highways into good pastures and corn-fields, and thereby to encrease, very considerably, the annual produce of its land and labour.” “But,” he adds, that “the commerce and industry of the country, though they may be somewhat augmented, cannot be altogether so secure, while they are thus suspended upon the Dædalian wings of paper, as when they travel about upon the solid ground of gold and silver.”

The intrinsic causes which give value to a sovereign are those which occasion gold to contribute to the gratification of mankind, and make it difficult of acquisition. Either of these may vary, and the value of the sovereign will experience a corresponding variation. But the value of a note for one hundred sovereigns is subject to vary in value, in correspondence not only with the money which it promises to pay, but with the honesty and solvency of the issuer. It may be worth a hundred sovereigns, or fifty, or nothing. The only mode of ascertaining its value in gold is to present it for payment, and thus relinquish, pro tanto, the convenience of paper, an expedient which will not be resorted to while confidence exists The grounds on which most persons rest their confidence must be exceedingly vague. They have seldom the means of accurately ascertaining the circumstances or the character of those on whom they bestow it, and their anxiety to effect sales leads them often to accept, with little scrutiny, the medium in which payment is proposed. The confidence thus blindly given must be subject to be as blindly withdrawn. The man who has taken notes as readily as money, because he saw them taken by others, is as ready to follow the example of others in rejecting them. The rejected notes crowd to the banker who has issued them. If they exceed in amount the money which he reserves in his coffers for their payment, and the reserve of even the most cautious banker seldom amounts to a third of the demands to which he is liable, he must provide funds by immediately calling in those debts of which he can demand immediate payment. In times of commercial prosperity, a banker, whose property is equal to his engagements, and who has managed his affairs with tolerable prudence, will find no difficulty, though he may sustain some loss, in thus meeting a demand, or, to use the common expression, a run upon him, for money, however extraordinary and sudden. If he have parted with no note without having previously received the full value of what that note promised to pay, and have always advanced what he so received in loans on good security, capable of being immediately called in or sold, (and these are the elementary rules for a banker’s conduct,) he may indeed lose his profit, but it is scarcely probable that his creditors should suffer. But if the run occur in a time of commercial distress, and still more if it be occasioned by commercial distress, not the utmost caution that is compatible with profitable banking, or the largest amount of surplus property which is likely to belong to one individual, or even to a few individuals, will enable a banker to meet the demands of all those who are entitled to call on him for immediate payment. His debtors find it difficult to make their regular and accustomed payments, and impossible to answer an unexpected call. The securities which he sells are sunk in value, by the concurrence of an increased number of sellers, and a diminished number of buyers. He ceases to pay his notes on demand, and they do not merely sink in value, they become for a time utterly valueless. The inconvenience and loss sustained by their holders spreads alarm among all possessed of paper currency. The demands on the issuers of notes for payment, and their inability to pay, spread like wildfire. A great portion, perhaps the greater portion, of what acted as the circulating medium of exchange throughout the country becomes valueless; and the effects are precisely the same as if an equal proportion of the metallic currency of the country had been suddenly annihilated or exported. Prices fall, the importation of commodities is checked, and their exportation is encouraged. The foreign exchanges become universally favourable, and the precious metals flow in until the void, occasioned by the destruction of the paper currency, has been filled. If, from fear of the recurrence of a similar calamity, the legislature should now endeavour to limit the use of paper money, and should succeed in the attempt, the additional money thus suddenly acquired will be permanently retained. But if things are left to take their own course, as soon as the storm is over the issue of paper will recommence, and the precious metals, for which it afforded a substitute, will be re-exported.

I have selected this from among the many cases in which the amount of the precious metals in a nation may require sudden increase or diminution, not because it is one of the most frequent ones, but because it is a tolerably accurate representation of the state of this country, so far as respects money, during the last eighteen months.* During the three years preceding 1825, and indeed in the beginning of that year, this country enjoyed remarkable commercial prosperity. Advantage had been taken of that prosperity, or rather of the general confidence which it produced, to substitute to a great degree a paper currency for the gold which previously circulated. The amount of country bank notes in circulation in 1822, as far as can be inferred from the stamp office returns,† was about twelve millions, and, in 1825, had risen to between eighteen and nineteen millions. Gold to the amount of above £4,400,000 sterling was exported in one year, 1824,* a part of it even to South America. I quoted in my third Lecture Mr. Tooke’s account of the commercial insanity which prevailed in the beginning of 1825. Instances so numerous, and so extensive, of the misdirection of industry, have, I suppose, never occurred. Our loans to foreign states, which, as far as we are concerned, have declared themselves insolvent, the waste of our mining speculations in America and in our own dominions, the dissipation of the funds of so many joint-stock companies, all these are among the most palpable, but not the most important instances. The greatest losses were probably sustained from our excessive importation of foreign commodities, at prices extravagantly raised by the mutual competition of the importers, and from an undue extension of particular branches of manufacture,—that of silks for instance,—from a miscalculation on the part of the manufacturer either of the quantity for which the public were ready to pay an equivalent, or of the extent of the whole concurrent additional supply.

Commercial blunders so gross and so extensive necessarily produced wide embarrassment and ruin: evils not confined to those whose miscalculation had first occasioned them, or even to their immediate work-people and dependents, but involving many, who, having acted with apparent prudence, suddenly found their market destroyed by the ruin of their expected customers. It was under these circumstances of commercial distress, that accident or malice occasioned a sudden run upon a considerable bank in the west of England. Its failure shook the credit of a great London banking-house, which, after struggling through difficulties for upwards of a week, during which it paid away, it is said, more than £1,400,000, stopped payment early in December. The notoriety of these difficulties in the first instance, and the eventual failure, spread terror among the creditors of the country banks, above thirty in number, connected with that house, and many of them were unable to stand the run which followed. The failure of a great Yorkshire bank alarmed the northern part of the kingdom; and the consternation became general, not only among the holders of local notes, but among depositors, as well in the metropolis as in the country. Then followed that dreadful week which has been called “the panic,” in which the question every morning was not, who has fallen? but, who stands?—in which nearly seventy banks suspended their payments: a state of things which, if it had continued only forty-eight hours longer, would, according to Mr. Huskisson,* have put a stop to all dealings between man and man, except by barter; in which, in fact, nothing but the unexpected arrival of about 200,000 sovereigns from France, the discovery, in the cellars of the Bank of England, of 800,000 one pound notes, long before condemned to be burnt, and the intervention of a Sunday, prevented the manifest failure of an establishment, which we have been accustomed almost to consider a part of the constitution.

Most happily, the Bank of England did not decidedly stop payment, and, most happily, its notes retained their currency, and, happily also, the directors had the courage to increase their issues. That increase, however, did not nearly equal in amount the country notes which had ceased to circulate. The effect, therefore, was the same as if a considerable portion of the currency of a country, having only a metallic currency, had been suddenly annihilated. Prices fell; the exchanges, which had been against us in our prosperity, became favourable in our adversity, and gold flowed in in every direction. Many of the boxes of sovereigns, which had been exported to Paris in the previous year, returned without ever having been unpacked. I believe the influx of gold has now ceased, but it continued during the greater part of last year.

As our misfortunes were attributed chiefly to our paper currency, especially to the portion of it consisting of small notes, an attempt was made immediately to limit, and ultimately to extinguish them. An act was passed prohibiting the issue in England of any small notes, stamped or dated after two periods in the year 1826, and absolutely forbidding their use in England after the 5th of April, 1829. Scotland and Ireland were to have been included in these enactments, but successfully resisted them. If these enactments are persisted in, and if the omission of Scotland and Ireland do not render them nugatory, we shall retain the gold which our distress forced upon us, and probably require a further supply. If we revert to our former system, we shall again part with that portion of our gold which the returning use of paper will have rendered unnecessary.

This is not the place to inquire whether our small notes really produced the evils attributed to them, or whether the security afforded by an increased metallic currency is worth the expense of keeping it up: they are subjects of great interest and difficulty, but will find their place rather at the close, than at the beginning of my Lectures. It is clear, however, that, as a question of immediate profit and loss, the necessity of importing so much gold during the last year must have considerably aggravated the distress of the country. It could have been obtained only by the sacrifice of the results of a portion of our industry and natural advantages, to obtain what? merely the privilege of giving a sovereign, where we had previously given a note or a check. It is clear, also, that if we again suffer small notes to form a considerable portion of our currency, the immediate consequence will be, that we shall export some millions of sovereigns, not only without inconvenience, but precisely because we find the use of the notes more convenient, and shall receive for them an equivalent in foreign commodities, every one of which will be a source of enjoyment. Nothing can be more correct than Adam Smith’s illustration. The use of the precious metals, or of any valuable article as money, like the use of fertile land for a road, may be necessary, but is a necessary evil. To part with them always produces an immediate increase of enjoyment, to purchase them is always an immediate sacrifice.

I propose, in the next two Lectures, to consider that extraordinary monument of human absurdity, the Mercantile Theory,—or, in other words, the opinion that wealth consists of gold and silver, and may be indefinitely increased by forcing their importation, and preventing their exportation: a theory which has occasioned, and still occasions, more vice, misery, and war, than all other errors put together.

[* ] Book iv. chap. 2.

[* ] This was spoken in June, 1827.

[† ] Tooke’s Currency, p. 39.

[* ] Mushett, Currency, p. 172.

[* ] Feb. 10th, 1826. Parl Hist. 199.