Newton has left to posterity no exposition of his opinions touching the currency.  But the tracts of Locke on this subject are happily still extant; and it may be doubted whether in any of his writings, even in those ingenious and deeply meditated chapters on language which form perhaps the most valuable part of the Essay on the Human Understanding, the force of his mind appears more conspicuously.  Whether he had ever been acquainted with Dudley North is not known.  In moral character the two men bore little resemblance to each other.  They belonged to different parties.  Indeed, had not Locke taken shelter from tyranny in Holland, it is by no means impossible that he might have been sent to Tyburn by a jury which Dudley North had packed.  Intellectually, however, there was much in common between the Tory and the Whig.  They had laboriously thought out, each for himself, a theory of political economy, substantially the same with that which Adam Smith afterwards expounded.  Nay, in some respects the theory of Locke and North was more complete and symmetrical than that of their illustrious successor.  Adam Smith has often been justly blamed for maintaining, in direct opposition to all his own principles, that the rate of interest ought to be regulated by the State; and he is the more blamable because, long before he was born, both Locke and North had taught that it was as absurd to make laws fixing the price of money as to make laws fixing the price of cutlery or of broadcloth.639

Dudley North died in 1693.  A short time before his death he published, without his name, a small tract which contains a concise sketch of a plan for the restoration of the currency.  This plan appears to have been substantially the same with that which was afterwards fully developed and ably defended by Locke.

One question, which was doubtless the subject of many anxious deliberations, was whether any thing should be done while the war lasted.  In whatever way the restoration of the coin might be effected, great sacrifices must be made, the whole community or by a part of the community.  And to call for such sacrifices at a time when the nation was already paying taxes such as, ten years before, no financier would have thought it possible to raise, was undoubtedly a course full of danger.  Timorous politicians were for delay; but the deliberate conviction of the great Whig leaders was that something must be hazarded, or that every thing was lost.  Montague, in particular, is said to have expressed in strong language his determination to kill or cure.  If indeed there had been any hope that the evil would merely continue to be what it was, it might have been wise to defer till the return of peace an experiment which must severely try the strength of the body politic.  But the evil was one which daily made progress almost visible to the eye.  There might have been a recoinage in 1691 with half the risk which must be run in 1696; and, great as would be the risk in 1696, that risk would be doubled if the coinage were postponed till 1698.