Draft of MINT00416 (Mint 19/3/74)

<129r>

To the Right Honourable the Lord High Treasurer of great Britain.

May it please your Lordship

In obedience to your Lordships Order of Reference of 27th Nov. upon the annexed Memorial of the three Commissioners appointed by her Majestys late Privy Council of Scotland to receive all the Scots & Forreign coin, see it melted into Ingots to be coined & certify the deficiency, in which Memorial they humbly desire that your Lordship will be pleased to appoint them a suitable reward for their own attendance & trouble & to pay their Clerk & other servants & defray the dayly charge they are put to: We have considered the said Memorial & because the business of these Commissioners requires diligent attendance & circumspected at the meltings & their trust in receiving the old money by tale & weight & computing & certifying the deficiency is also considerable; we are humbly of opinion that they may deserve for themselves & their Clerk & other servants after the rate of three farthings per pound tale of all the new money paid back from the Mint to the Bank & from the Bank to private importers & these Commissioners acting with the Bank of Scotland & public importers & doing the business of private persons before the coynage of their silver begins we are humbly of opinion that the equivalent was the most proper fund for the payment of this allowance& that it should have been deducted & reserved for these Commissioners out of the new moneys paid back to private importers from the beginning of the coynage Commrs, which deduction & reservation not being made we know not what other fund to propose for the time past. Parliament enacted that all dues from the Equivalent should be paid in such Order as the Exchequer of North Britain should appoint the designe of which Act we humbly conceive was not to contradict or repeale any part of the Act of Vnion but only to order the course of payments so far as it was not ordered by the Act of Vnion & in the said Act of Vnion there is a clause importing that the losses which private persons may sustein by the recoinage of the money should in the first place be made good out of the Equivalent: We are humbly of opinion that the Commissioners of the Equivalent may lawfully pay the said allowances before all other dues not relating to the coinage

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{illeg}of the Importers & so to be recconned among the losses which private persons sustein by the recoinage of their money, the recoinage being otherwise impracticable. And by consequence the Equivalent is by the Act of Vnion, the most proper fund for paying this charge

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account of the importations & their deficiencies: