To this must be added another and most important cause, which operated since the peace of 1815 in withdrawing the precious metals from the globe, arising from the very scarcity of these metals themselves. The addition which their enhanced value made to the riches of the affluent was so great, that it led to a rapid and most important increase in the consumption of gold and silver in articles of luxury. Gold and silver plate, jewels, and other ornaments set in gold, became general among the richer classes, and to an extent unprecedented since the fall of the Roman empire. Gilding was employed so much in furniture, the frames of pictures, the roofs of rooms, carriages, and other articles of state or show, as to withdraw a considerable part of that the most precious of the precious metals from the monetary circulation. The scarcer gold and silver became, the more was this direction of a large portion of it increased, because the richer did the fortunate few who possessed amassed capital become from the daily decline in the price of all other articles of merchandise. This effect was most conspicuous in ancient Rome in its latter days, where, while the legions dwindled into cohorts from the impossibility of finding funds to pay them in large numbers, and the fields of Italy became desolate from the impossibility of obtaining a remunerating price for their produce, the gold and silver vases, statues, and ornaments amassed in the hands of the wealthy patricians in Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, and the other great cities of the empire, so prodigiously increased, that, with the currency, which formed but a small part of its amount, their value is estimated by Gibbon at the almost incredible amount of £350,000,000 sterling of our money.