A National Numerary Currency.

When these truths are established, and the people have discovered that they may grasp with their own hands, and hold entirely amenable to their own control, an institution so powerful for good or mischievous ends as money, it can scarcely be doubted that the people of New Zealand will hasten to enshrine in their laws " a national numerary currency," where it shall stand as it was depicted by the great and eloquent Mirabeau—"a money dependent neither upon the fertility of the mines, nor upon the avarice nor the caprice of their possessors."

We are accustomed to believe that we have been always advancing for 1,000 years till we have reached this brilliant and eventful century, and are too apt to forget our very recent emergence from the ignorance, the violence, the servile condition of the mediœval ages—it is scarcely a century since the French and American Revolution, and not a century since the enfranchisement of our industrial classes from serfdom. We have scarcely yet become accustomed to the word—Liberty—or to know its deep significance. It is not, therefore, a subject of wonder why we are only now attempting to penetrate the inmost arcana of a polity to which only the light of a long continued civilisation had led the ancient world—in their efforts to ensure for themselves—equity and stability—in their monetary system.