We should greatly err if we measured the effects of this vast addition to the metallic treasures of the globe merely by its effect in raising prices, great and important as that effect undoubtedly is. That it will raise prices, gradually, indeed, but certainly, so that in twenty years they will have reached the level they had attained during the extensive demand and plentiful paper circulation of the war, may be considered certain. No human power can arrest the change any more than it can the rays of summer or the rains of autumn; and, therefore, all concerned—money-lenders, money-borrowers, capitalists, landlords, farmers, and manufacturers—had just as well make up their minds to it as _un fait accompli_, and regulate their measures and calculations accordingly. But a still more important effect, in reference to our laws and social condition in the mean time, is to be found in its tendency to _keep the paper circulation out_, and allay the apprehensions of bankers and money-lenders as to the risks of extending their issues, from a dread of an approaching monetary crisis, and a run upon their establishments for a conversion of their notes into gold. These monetary crises, which have occurred so often, and been attended with such devastation, during the last thirty years, were all of artificial creation. They were never known before the fatal system was introduced of considering paper not as a _substitute for_, but as a _representative of gold_, and of course entirely dependent for its extension or contraction upon the retention of, or a drain upon, the reserves of the precious metals. It is to the Bullion Committee of 1810, and the adoption of its doctrines by Sir Robert Peel by the Bill of 1819, that we owe that fatal change which not only deprived us of the chief advantages of credit, but converted it into the source of the most _unmeasured evil_, by stimulating industry in the most unbounded way at one time, and as suddenly and violently contracting it at another. The true use of a paper circulation, properly based, judiciously issued, and founded upon credit, is just the reverse: it is to supply the circulation, and keep it at the level which the wants of the community require in those periods of necessary periodical recurrence to every mercantile state, when the precious metals are drained away in large quantities by the necessities of war or the demands of a fluctuating commerce; and when, unless its place is supplied by the enlarged issue of paper, nothing but ruin and misery to all persons engaged in industrial occupations can ensue. Supplied by such a succedaneum, the most entire departure of the precious metals is attended, as was proved in 1810, by no sort of distress, either to the nation or the individuals of which it is composed. Without such a reserve to fall back upon—or, what is worse, with the reserve itself rendered dependent on the retention of the precious metals—any considerable drain upon them is the