W. C a r e w H a z l i t t Coinage of the European Continent

Introduction 49
Immense quantities of those strange unwieldy discs of
copper, stamped with a value representing only the cost of
the metal, once existed in Sweden, where the buyer of
old days must have carried his money, not in a purse,
but in a cart, and where weight was almost evidently given
for weight a daler's worth of provisions or goods balancing
a daler itself in the scales. The output and circulation of
gold and silver were extremely circumscribed.
The introduction of this heavy and barbarous medium
into the Swedish dominions was not, however, an abrupt
step or a rudimentary effort for from the
;
reign of Gustavus
Adolphus (161 1-32) the kingdom had possessed the denomination
known as an or and its divisions. The original
the common
or resembled in fabric, and equalled in weight,
Russian 5 -kopeck piece current from 1758 to 1804, or
thereabout; and the ponderous dalers of Charles XII. and his
successors amounted to an extension or exaggeration of this
currency. Prior to the or the Swredes had had nothing in
copper larger than the mark of John
same metal and of the same reign, called the New Stockholm
money (1573). In other words, the abnormal dalers
III. and a coin in the
of the fifteenth century corresponded with an epoch, not
of numismatic infancy or of rising power, but with one of
decline, when the country reverted temporarily to primitive
methods of finance, and after about half a century (1697-
1747) of trial relinquished them, perhaps from their sheer
impracticability.
In the time of Catherine I. of Russia (1725-28) an
experiment was made in the same direction and from a
similar motive the motive which actuated the primitive
rulers of Sparta but no further ; progress was made in it,
and two or three patterns of the square copper rouble and
kopeck of 1726 appear to be all that survives of the
attempt to emulate Sweden.