mixing your gold and silver coin with copper,--this, one grieves to
say, is the Second and extreme resource. (A rude method--would we
had a better--of suspending Cash-payments, and paying by bank-notes
instead!' thinks Friedrich, I suppose. From his Prussian Mints,
from his Saxon [which are his for the present], and from the little
Anhalt-Bernburg Mint [of which he expressly purchased the sad
privilege,--for we are not a Coiner, we are a King reduced to
suspend Cash-payments, for the time being], Friedrich poured out
over all Germany, in all manner of kinds, huge quantities of bad
Coin. This, so long as it would last, is more and more a copious
fountain of supply. This, for the first time, has had to appear as
an item in War-Budget 1759: and it fails in no following, but
expands more and more. It was done through Ephraim, the not lovely
Berlin Jew, whom we used to hear of in Voltaire's time;--through
Ephraim and two others, Ephraim as President: in return for a net
Sum, these shall have privilege to coin such and such amounts, so
and so alloyed; shall pay to General Tauentzien, Army Treasurer, at
fixed terms, the Sums specified: 'Go, and do it; our Mint-Officers
sharply watching you; Mint-Officers, and General Tauentzien [with a
young Herr Lessing, as his Chief Clerk, of whom the King knows
nothing]; Go, ye unlovely!' And Ephraim and Company are making a
great deal of money by the unlovely job. Ephraim is the pair of
tongs, the hand, and the unlovely job, are a royal man's.
Alas, yes. And none of us knows better than King Friedrich, perhaps
few of us as well, how little lovely a job it was; how shockingly
UNkingly it was,--though a practice not unknown to German Kings and
Kinglets before his time, and since down almost to ours.
[In STENZEL (v. 141) enumeration of eight or nine unhappy
Potentates, who were busy with it in those same years.] In fact,
these are all unkingly practices;--and the English Subsidy itself