The evils produced by this state of the currency were not such as have generally been thought worthy to occupy a prominent place in history.  Yet it may well be doubted whether all the misery which had been inflicted on the English nation in a quarter of a century by bad Kings, bad Ministers, bad Parliaments and bad judges, was equal to the misery caused in a single year by bad crowns and bad shillings.  Those events which furnish the best themes for pathetic or indignant eloquence are not always those which most affect the happiness of the great body of the people.  The misgovernment of Charles and James, gross as it had been, had not prevented the common business of life from going steadily and prosperously on.  While the honour and independence of the State were sold to a foreign power, while chartered rights were invaded, while fundamental laws were violated, hundreds of thousands of quiet, honest and industrious families laboured and traded, ate their meals and lay down to rest, in comfort and security.  Whether Whigs or Tories, Protestants or Jesuits were uppermost, the grazier drove his beasts to market; the grocer weighed out his currants; the draper measured out his broadcloth; the hum of buyers and sellers was as loud as ever in the towns; the harvest home was celebrated as joyously as ever in the hamlets; the cream overflowed the pails of Cheshire; the apple juice foamed in the presses of Herefordshire; the piles of crockery glowed in the furnaces of the Trent; and the barrows of coal rolled fast along the timber railways of the Tyne.  But when the great instrument of exchange became thoroughly deranged, all trade, all industry, were smitten as with a palsy.  The evil was felt daily and hourly in almost every place and by almost every class, in the dairy and on the threshing floor, by the anvil and by the loom, on the billows of the ocean and in the depths of the mine.  Nothing could be purchased without a dispute.  Over every counter there was wrangling from morning to night.  The workman and his employer had a quarrel as regularly as the Saturday came round.  On a fair day or a market day the clamours, the reproaches, the taunts, the curses, were incessant; and it was well if no booth was overturned and no head broken.637 No merchant would contract to deliver goods without making some stipulation about the quality of the coin in which he was to be paid.  Even men of business were often bewildered by the confusion into which all pecuniary transactions were thrown.  The simple and the careless were pillaged without mercy by extortioners whose demands grew even more rapidly than the money shrank.  The price of the necessaries of life, of shoes, of ale, of oatmeal, rose fast.  The labourer found that the bit of metal which when he received it was called a shilling would hardly, when he wanted to purchase a pot of beer or a loaf of rye bread, go as far as sixpence.  Where artisans of more than usual intelligence were collected together