pass at face value in trade. Although the base-metal nickel was not widely accepted in the far West, the silver half dime had been struck in increasing numbers at the San Francisco Mint until the silver coin, which did not circulate in the East, was abolished by Congress in 1873. A shortage of small change resulted, especially as half dimes were used in the jewelry trade; customers complained they could not get full change for an item costing ten cents for which they paid with a quarter. Prices in the West were sometimes in bits (12 cents, based on the old Spanish colonial real, although those pieces no longer circulated), adding to the change problem. Numismatist David Lange states that a shipment of nickels out West could have solved everything, but that they might not have been accepted due to the prejudice against money which did not contain precious metal. A second factor was the anxiety of Congress to see more silver made into coin. This was due to pressure from mining and other interests. The Coinage Act of 1873 ended the practice of allowing silver producers to have their bullion struck into silver dollars and returned to them. Although producers had not deposited much silver in the years before 1873 due to high market prices, former mint director Henry Linderman foresaw that those prices would fall as mines became accessible due to the completion of the transcontinental railroad across the United States, and that the resultant coinage would inflate the currency. He quietly urged Congress to end the practice, which it did. Within a year, silver prices had dropped, and producers tried vainly to deposit bullion at the mints for conversion into legal tender. Mining interests sought other means of selling silver to the government. The third was American interest in aligning its currency with the Latin Monetary Union and to bring its weights for coinage into the metric system. Several times in the 1860s and 1870s, the United States Mint struck pattern coins that were to be used if America joined, in some cases with the equivalent in foreign money struck as part of the design. The twenty-cent piece was to be equivalent to one French franc in that system, and if in proportion to the smaller silver coins being struck, would weigh five grams, a fact which appealed to advocates of the metric system in Congress. Another