The principles of the Recoinage Act are excellent.  But some of the details, both of that Act and of a supplementary Act which was passed at a later period of the session, seem to prove that Montague had not fully considered what legislation can, and what it cannot, effect.  For example, he persuaded the Parliament to enact that it should be penal to give or take more than twenty-two shillings for a guinea.  It may be confidently affirmed that this enactment was not suggested or approved by Locke.  He well knew that the high price of gold was not the evil which afflicted the State, but merely a symptom of that evil, and that a fall in the price of gold would inevitably follow, and could by no human power or ingenuity be made to precede, the recoinage of the silver.  In fact, the penalty seems to have produced no effect whatever, good or bad.  Till the milled silver was in circulation, the guinea continued, in spite of the law, to pass for thirty shillings.  When the milled silver became plentiful, the guinea fell, not to twenty-two shillings, which was the highest price allowed by the law, but to twenty-one shillings and sixpence.649

Early in February the panic which had been caused by the first debates on the currency subsided; and, from that time till the fourth of May, the want of money was not very severely felt.  The recoinage began.  Ten furnaces were erected, in the garden behind the Treasury; and every day huge heaps of pared and defaced crowns and shillings were turned into massy ingots which were instantly sent off to the mint in the Tower.650

With the fate of the law which restored the currency was closely connected the fate of another law, which had been several years under the consideration of Parliament, and had caused several warm disputes between the hereditary and the elective branch of the legislature.  The session had scarcely commenced when the Bill for regulating Trials in cases of High Treason was again laid on the table of the Commons.  Of the debates to which it gave occasion nothing is known except one interesting circumstance which has been preserved by tradition.  Among those who supported the bill appeared conspicuous a young Whig of high rank, of ample fortune, and of great abilities which had been assiduously improved by study.  This was Anthony Ashley Cooper, Lord Ashley, eldest son of the second Earl of Shaftesbury, and grandson of that renowned politician who had, in the days of Charles the Second, been at one time the most unprincipled of ministers, and at another the most unprincipled of demagogues.  Ashley had just been returned to Parliament for the borough of Poole, and was in his twenty-fifth year.  In the course of his speech he faltered, stammered and seemed to lose the thread of his reasoning.  The House, then, as now, indulgent to novices, and then, as now, well aware that, on a first appearance, the hesitation which is the effect of modesty and sensibility is quite as promising a sign as volubility