At the beginning of the present century, full thirteen hundred millions sterling of gold and silver had been extracted from the earth for the use of mankind, and poured into Europe, since the year 1500. But one-third of this enormous quantity had been exported from Europe, chiefly to Asia; a still larger quantity had been converted into plate and ornaments; while about one-eighth (or 170 millions) had been lost to the use of mankind, by casualties and abrasion. The total quantity of gold and silver existing as coin in Europe at the beginning of the present century is reckoned to have amounted to about 380 millions sterling. This was more than ten times as large as the stock existing at the date of the discovery of America; and the annual supply was in a still larger proportion to what it had been in A.D. 1492. Some of the American mines had become exhausted, but these were more than replaced by the 1 See supra, note to chap. x. progressive discovery of new ones; and thus the annual supply of gold and silver which had amounted to about two millions sterling in the middle of the sixteenth century, after the discovery of Potosi in 1544, had increased by steady gradation until the beginning of the present century, when it amounted to fully ten millions sterling, of which annual sum £2,634,000 was gold, and £7,733,000 was silver.1 Despite this large increase in the existing stock of gold and silver, and not less so in the annual supply, the growth of population and of trade, especially foreign trade-nay, even the growth of Wealth, which of itself needs more money as a means of storing and utilising it-had rendered the stock of the precious metals in Europe less adequate for men's wants than it had been in 1640 and for a century and a half thereafter. Gold and silver had been growing somewhat dearer, and the value of money had perceptibly risen, before the present century began. But now a great and serious change was at hand; and in both of its shapes, and also in its causes, the direful change may be regarded as a legacy from the closing events of the eighteenth century. The renewed scarcity was occasioned by 1 Humboldt states the total produce of the gold and silver mines of the world (exclusive of Asia), in the year 1809, as follows: |