It was vain to tell the common people that the mutilators of the coin were causing far more misery than all the highwaymen and housebreakers in the island.  For, great as the aggregate of the evil was, only an infinitesimal part of that evil was brought home to the individual malefactor.  There was, therefore, a general conspiracy to prevent the law from taking its course.  The convictions, numerous as they might seem, were few indeed when compared with the offences; and the offenders who were convicted looked on themselves as murdered men, and were firm in the belief that their sin, if sin it were, was as venial as that of a schoolboy who goes nutting in the wood of a neighbour.  All the eloquence of the ordinary could seldom induce them to conform to the wholesome usage of acknowledging in their dying speeches the enormity of their wickedness.633

The evil proceeded with constantly accelerating velocity.  At length in the autumn of 1695 it could hardly be said that the country possessed, for practical purposes, any measure of the value of commodities.  It was a mere chance whether what was called a shilling was really tenpence, sixpence or a groat.  The results of some experiments which were tried at that time deserve to be mentioned.  The officers of the Exchequer weighed fifty-seven thousand two hundred pounds of hammered money which had recently been paid in.  The weight ought to have been above two hundred and twenty thousand ounces.  It proved to be under one hundred and fourteen thousand ounces.634 Three eminent London goldsmiths were invited to send a hundred pounds each in current silver to be tried by the balance.  Three hundred pounds ought to have weighed about twelve hundred ounces.  The actual weight proved to be six hundred and twenty-four ounces.  The same test was applied in various parts of the kingdom.  It was found that a hundred pounds, which should have weighed about four hundred ounces, did actually weigh at Bristol two hundred and forty ounces, at Cambridge two hundred and three, at Exeter one hundred and eighty, and at Oxford only one hundred and sixteen.635 There were, indeed, some northern districts into which the clipped money had only begun to find its way.  An honest Quaker, who lived in one of these districts, recorded, in some notes which are still extant, the amazement with which, when he travelled southward, shopkeepers and innkeepers stared at the broad and heavy halfcrowns with which he paid his way.  They asked whence he came, and where such money was to be found.  The guinea which he purchased for twenty-two shillings at Lancaster bore a different value at every stage of his journey.  When he reached London it was worth thirty shillings, and would indeed have been worth more had not the government fixed that rate as the highest at which gold should be received in the payment of taxes.636