The market value of "a pound" depends less on the supply of gold than on the extravagance or economy of the persons holding documentary currency (that is to say, claim to goods). Suppose, for instance, that I hold stock to the value of £500 a year;--if I live on a hundred a year, and lay by four hundred, I (for the time) keep down the prices of all goods to the distributed amount of £400 a year, or, in other words, neutralize the effect on the market of 400 pounds in gold imported annually from Australia. If, instead of laying by this sum in paper, I choose to throw it into bullion (whether gold-plate or coin does not matter), I not only keep down the price of goods, but raise the price of gold as a commodity, and neutralize 800 pounds' worth of imported gold. But if I annually spend my entire 500 (unproductively) I annually raise the price of goods by that amount, and neutralize a correspondent diminution in the supply of gold. If I spend my 500 productively, that is to say, so as to produce as much as, or more than I consume, I either leave the market as I find it, or by the excess of production increase the value of gold. Similarly, whatever I lay by will, as it is ultimately spent by my successors, productively or unproductively, in that degree (_cœteris paribus_) increase or lower the value of gold. These agencies of daily economy have so much more power over the market than the supply from the mine that no statistics of which we are yet in possession are (at least in their existing form) sufficient to prove the dependence of any given phenomena of the market on the rate of metallic supply. The destruction of property in the American war and our European amusements in the manufacture of monster guns and steel "backings" lower the value of money far more surely and fatally than an increased supply of bullion, for the latter may very possibly excite parallel force of productive industry. But the lowered value of money is often (and this is a very curious case of economical back current) indicated, not so much by a rise in the price of goods, as by a fall in that of labor. The household lives as comfortably as it did on a hundred a year, but the master has to work half as hard again to get it. This increase of toil is to an active nation often a kind of play; men go into it as into a violent game; fathers of families die quicker, and the gates of orphan asylums are choked with applicants; distress and crime spread and fester through a thousand silent channels; but there is no commercial or elementary convulsion; no chasm opens into the abyss through the London clay; no gilded victim is asked of the Guards; the Stock-Exchange falls into no hysterics; and the old lady of Threadneedle Street does not so much as ask for "My fan, Peter." I am, Sir, your obedient servant, J. RUSKIN. CHAMOUNIX, _Oct._ 2. FOOTNOTES: