Chapter 6 traces the last years of Britain’s communal currency. From the chapter’s examination of the resumption debate, it emerges that the decision on resumption stemmed from loss of faith in inconvertible currency and the fractured state of British society, rather than from unanimous support for the theory or policy of the gold standard. This chapter reveals that the supporters of resumption were a mixed group of people, including those with metallist and non-metallist views alike. The anti-resumption campaign lacked coherence, but ultimately it was the fractured state of British society that made inconvertible currency unsustainable: Britain’s note users no longer saw themselves as a single community of money users but as competing groups with different economic interests. The rest of the chapter illustrates the process by which the remnants of communal currency were gradually chipped away in the following twelve years, which were punctuated by major events such as the financial crisis of 1825 and the political run on the Bank of England in 1832. This chapter closes in 1833, when the fate of currency voluntarism was finally sealed as the Bank note became legal tender.

Frequently serving as accusers, or as facilitators for other accusers, Northwest Mounted Police officers were coached on how and when to delimit social disorder. The fifth Chapter highlights examples of their training to perform as accusers (or to facilitate other accusers) around theatres that categorized criminal acts and actors. Here officers were instructed in both ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ governance (as per Bentham), with lessons derived from paramilitary and police science disciplines. Recruits learned how to follow commands to deploy violence, and how to use discretion in efforts to prevent dissent. With inspiration from the Royal Irish Constabulary, police officers also learned how to become criminal accusers by habit. That training, with its colonial biases clear, is detectable from a paradigmatic example of police responses to the first death of a Northwest Mounted constable in 1882. Located within a settler assumptive universe supporting dispossessing visions of social order, one glimpses how police training in this case focused accusations on Indigenous persons.