THE of country's monetary standard and controversies arising from efforts to deal with it appear persistently and recurrently in American history. From land-bank episodes of late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to tight policy of Federal Reserve System in 1959, money problem has intruded itself vigorously into social and political conflicts, giving American history much of its flavor. Pine Tree shilling, Land Bank of 1740, Continental currency, provisions of federal constitution with respect to bills of credit, Jackson versus Second United States Bank, greenbacks and greenbackism, the way to resume is to resume, Crime of free silver at 16 to 1, Roosevelt gold program, and gold-clause cases of 1935-all these certainly enlivened their times. Most of them have been examined intensively and written about extensively, sometimes by historians, sometimes by economists. Frequently, historians have not been greatly concerned with basic economic issues. Too often economists have written history as seen through glasses of normative monetary theory. Coinage Legislation of 1834 is a case in point.' In present note I propose to examine briefly Crime of 1873. What was Crime of 1873? Who did what in that year, to whom, and with what venal, corrupt, or fraudulent motives? Briefly, event was simply of Congress to in a long, very detailed, and, for most part, technical revision of country's laws pertaining to mints, assay offices, and coinage any provision for continuing coinage of standard 412.5-grain silver dollar containing 371.25 grains of fine silver. Answers to questions about nature of are found largely in writings of persons, chiefly economists, who deny that there was any crime and then tell us what it was that was done which was not criminal. One of these writers, J. Laurence Laughlin, has told us, in effect, that there was no crime of 1873 but that if there was, it occurred in 1874, not in 1873 !2 Laughlin's point was that real demonetization of silver dollar resulted not from coinage legislation of 1873 but from adoption of section 3568 of Revised Statutes of United States (a general revision made in 1874), which said: The silver coins of United States shall not be a legal tender at their nominal value for any amount exceeding five dollars in any one payment. Laughlin's comment was: The Act of 1873 only discontinued its [the silver dollar's] coinage; provision of Revised Statutes took away its debt paying power for sums beyond five dollars. This, he argued, was a real blow at remaining stock of silver dollars, but he insisted that it was an inadvertent blow, a routine and logical consequence of failure, in 1873, to standard silver dollar in list of coins to be coined at mints. By absolving those responsible for this 1873 failure to include of any sinister purpose, Laughlin, Horace White, A. D. Noyes, Davis R. Dewey, and others have ridiculed and quite successfully discredited whole notion of a crime. According to them, failure to include represented merely a legal recognition of an economic fact of life-that silver dollars had largely ceased to be coined in United States following gold discoveries in California (1848-50) because, under legal coinage ratio of approximately 16 to 1 adopted in 1834-37, silver had come to be