After a series of twists and turns, on May 12, 1855, the first currency issued after the founding of the New Holy Roman Empire—the New Holy Roman Empire Rhenish Guilder—was officially released to the public.
The Vienna Government successfully secured the right to mint currency, and the reserve funds of every constituent state government were also consolidated into the reserves of the Imperial Central Bank, though they were temporarily kept in the individual states.
It was not that Franz did not want to settle everything in one stroke. The main concern was that they had just carved a piece of meat from the bowls of the constituent state governments; further provoking their nerves could easily trigger a backlash.
Since everyone wanted to keep the funds in their own hands, they could keep them. So long as the central government sent people to supervise them and prohibited anyone from touching those reserves, that was enough.
Without question, once it obtained the right to mint currency, the central government could legally collect seigniorage from the constituent states. As the name implied, seigniorage was the profit gained from issuing currency after costs were deducted.
Of course, this was still the era of the gold standard, so reserves were still necessary. The profits from issuing currency could not possibly be as great as they would be in the future age of fiat money.
Even so, seigniorage was an important component of fiscal revenue. Compared with it, taxes on tobacco and alcohol were utterly feeble—there was simply no comparing them.
What the British wanted in establishing the "Pound Sterling–Gold" system was, in essence, to collect the world's seigniorage. Clearly, this required recognition from every country; everyone had to be willing to settle international trade in pounds sterling.
There were only two ways to accomplish that: