thing peculiar to the economic condition of a gold country tending to the discouragement of agriculture, and to the removal of the order of industrial development that Adam Smith describes as the natural one? Upon Adam Smith's own principles it follows that the industries which supply the prime necessaries of the miner's life and occupation must be the first to settle themselves near the gold diggings, and this alone would account for commerce taking precedence of agriculture, since the miner cannot wait for food until it is grown in his new country, and he wants many things besides the food that the most fertile soil can supply him with. He wants, for instance, first of all things, whisky. If you ask,' says a Cariboo correspondent of the British Colonist, 'why provisions are so high, look at the nature of the first invoices which invariably follow civilization, and the predominant article will invariably be whisky.' The miner wants also tools, boots, and other articles, which will not grow out of the ground, and which he must get from the merchant, and not from the farmer. For this reason alone we might look for the appearance of ships before farms in a mining colony, and the growth of towns before the cultivation of the country. But this is not the whole of the matter. Another principle, known to the student of modern political economy, is on the side of commerce against agriculture. That is, when a country has a pre-eminent advantage over other countries in the production of one or two commodities, it may be more profitable to import than to produce at home commodities for the production of which it has not so decided a superiority. It may be that British Columbia has pastures richer than any in the British Isles; yet it may be cheaper to bring English cheeses and Irish cattle round Cape Horn than to find them in the colony. The British Colonist speaks of Cariboo prices as offering a bounty on farming near Cariboo, but forgets that those prices also impose an enormous tax on the farmer, who has to pay for labour and every other requisite at an extravagant rate. Gold is cheap at Cariboo, and dear abroad; it flies from the cheap to the dear market, and the first people to surround the miner are those who act as his agents and carriers to and from foreign countries. Packers, storekeepers, merchants, are the people he

deals with, because they fetch what he wants from places where gold is comparatively scarce, and labour comparatively cheap. The metallic riches of British Columbia make agriculture proportionately costly in the colony, since every labourer looks for a miner's earnings, and farm labourers are not to be had unless for enormous wages. It is not then absence of fertile land, nor the presence of Red Indians and mosquitoes that forms the main impediment to farming in British Columbia; it is the presence of mines of still greater fertility for the time than its richest soils. The distance of the mines from the coast, the distance again of the colonial harbours from Oregon and San Francisco may afford protection to the colonial producer of fresh meat and vegetables for the gold diggings; but the growth of cereals to any extent, or anything in the nature of elaborate agriculture is not likely to be seen in British Columbia for years. Its exports of gold for some time will probably be great, and its imports of provisions in exchange will as probably not be small.

XX.

THE DISTRIBUTION AND VALUE OF THE PRECIOUS METALS IN THE SIXTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES.

(Macmillan's Magazine, August, 1864.)

Ir seems to be still a matter of doubt with many, whether the new mines have actually diminished the purchasing power of gold, or have only contributed the additional currency required by the increase of the world's commodities and trade. Fortunately for those who care to pursue the inquiry, the very causes which, by their complexity and fluctuating character, make it vain to seek an exact measure of the effect of the new gold on prices, are in themselves subjects of great interest; for the history of prices is interwoven with the history of the progress and fortunes of mankind. Several writers on the gold question have drawn conclusions from the fall in the value of both the precious metals after the discovery of America; but, without a careful comparison of the economical conditions of that epoch and the present, no sort of inference can be rationally made; and the comparison--one might say the contrastabounds in instruction apart from the light it throws on the monetary problem. The proper region of money is the region of industry, roads, navigation, and trade; and prices tend to approach to equality as these are improved, as men become equally civilized, and as political disorders cease to interrupt human intercourse and prosperity. At this day, in the most civilized countries, the precious metals serve two masters-war

and commerce; but in those least civilized they serve none. The currents from the mines may vibrate through a third of the habitable globe, but they have no conductors through more than half of Asia and South America, or through almost the whole of Africa. In the sixteenth century, the bulk of the people of Europe itself could seldom, if ever, have touched a coin from the mines of Mexico or Peru. There was no even distribution through Christendom of the treasure which the Spaniards tore from the New World; and on this and other accounts prices rose unequally in different places, and not at all in some. In the chief towns of Spain they seem to have risen even before the fifteenth century had closed; and in the Netherlands their ascent was much earlier than in England, where the state of the currency before 1560, and the drain consequent on its debasement, together with the foreign expenditure of the Government, both retarded and concealed the first symptoms of the falling value of the precious metals. During the first sixteen years after the mine of Potosi was opened, although prices measured in base coin rose rapidly in England, they rose in no proportion to the increase of silver and gold in the world. There was, as it were, a hole in the English purse; and the ancient fine coin of the realm ran out into the foreigner's hands as fast as the new base coin was poured in (just as eagles and dollars have been driven from the American States by the issues of paper). Moreover, war with France and Scotland drew much money out of England, and most of the treasure netted upon trade was hoarded or made into plate. But with Elizabeth came peace with France and a reformation of the currency; silver flowed fast into the Royal Mint; old fine coin returned into the market; and prices, instead of falling in proportion to the improvement of the currency, contiuued to rise, because the new issues exceeded the old, and the increase of commodities, great as it was, did not keep pace with the increase of money and men in the most prosperous parts of the country. Prices depend on the quantity of money in proportion to commodities-not on its quality-whether it be made of

* In 1545. The increase of the precious metals before that year was not. considerable.

metal or paper. Prices accordingly in England before 1560 rose in proportion to the increase of base money, and not in proportion to its baseness. One Englishman alone, however, down to 1581, seems to have connected the phenomenon of extraordinary dearness in the midst of extraordinary plenty, which was the common complaint, with the mines of the New World. With others it was a cry of class against class, for covetousness, extortion, extravagance, and luxury; and of all classes against the landlords for exorbitant rents and enclosures. The complaint against enclosures, that they fed sheep instead of men, was no new one; it had been a popular grievance for more than a century, and a subject of legislation before the discovery of America. A recent writer, nevertheless, supposes that at the period of Stafford's Dialogues, the foreign demand springing from the increased supply of the precious metals fell principally upon wool. The price of wool accordingly rose more rapidly than that of other industrial products in England; the profits of sheep-farming outran the profits of other occupations, and the result was that extensive conversion of arable land into pasture which the interlocutors in the Dialogues describe, and which was undoubtedly the proximate cause of the prevailing distress.' But the truth is, that corn was not, as this theory assumes, at once comparatively scarce and comparatively cheap; the real paradox is, that it was, like other articles of food, extraordinarily plentiful in the country, and extraordinarily dear in and near the

* William Stafford, the supposed author of the famous 'Dialogues,' published in 1851. He says:-'Another cause I conceive to be the great plenty of treasure which is walking in these parts of the world, far more than our forefathers have seen. Who doth not understand of the infinite sums of gold and silver which are gathered from the Indies and other countries, and so yearly transferred into these coasts ?' &c., &c.-See Harl. Misc. vol. ix.

+Political Eonomy as a Branch of General Education.' By J. E. Cairnes, Esq. It is immaterial to the point in question above, but not to the monetary history of the period, to observe that unmanufactured wool was then far from being the chief export from England, and that the loom was then as now England's chief mine. But, had the price of wool been disproportionately high, and led to the growth of sheep in place of corn, the price of mutton should have been comparatively low, whereas its price, like that of beef, was extravagantly high in comparison with all former rates.