Nothing was done, however, in following up these recommendations, till the subject was brought before the House of Commons by Dr John Bowring, in 1847.  The consequence of his appeal was, that a coin denominated a florin, and representing the tenth of a pound, was struck, and put in circulation.  It was, however, considered ’an unfortunate specimen of Royal Mint art,’ and the issue was discontinued, though a few specimens still linger unforbidden among us.  The matter is thus at a stand-still, and may probably not be agitated again till the people generally are more impressed with its importance, and disposed to urge it on the legislature.

The first thing wanted is obviously an abundant issue of acceptable florins.  No matter though the coin be recognised by the ignorant as a two-shilling piece, rather than as the tenth of a pound; it is a decimal coin with which they may become familiar without disturbing their old ideas and modes of reckoning.  The single step that would then remain to be taken is the decisive one—­the introduction of the coin equivalent to one-tenth of a florin, accompanied by the withdrawal of the representatives of duodecimal division, and a legislative enactment that all accounts kept in public offices, or rendered in private transactions, should be in the decimal denominations.

The only difficulty which has appalled the advocates of the decimal system, is with respect to the cent-piece.  It is said to be too small for a silver coin, too large for a copper, and mixed metals find no favour at the Mint.  But if it is to be a denomination in accounts, it must have a representative coin, and a silver cent could be very little smaller than our present 3d.-piece.  ‘The great mass of the people,’ says Mr Norton (a correspondent of the Athenaeum on this subject), ’will not adopt an abstraction; you must give them something which they can see, handle, and call by name, if you wish them to take notice of it in their reckonings.’  Mr Taylor, and some other writers, have proposed to evade this difficulty by passing over the cents altogether, and counting only by pounds, florins, and millets.  The French, say they, have in theory a decimally graduated scale, yet they always reckon by francs, and cents, which are 100ths of francs; the intervening decime being ignored in practice.  So, likewise, the Americans have the dollar, the dime (its tenth part), the cent (its hundredth), and the mill (its thousandth).  ‘It is now nearly thirty years,’ says Mr John Quincy Adams, in his report to Congress in 1821, ’since our new moneys of account have been established.  The dollar and the cent have become familiarised to the tongue, but the dime and the mill are so utterly unknown, that now, when the recent coinage of dimes is alluded to, it is always necessary to inform the reader that they are ten-cent pieces.  Ask a tradesman in any of our cities what is a dime or a mill, and the chances are four in five that he will not understand