Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 69, No. 423, January 1851Various
History
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 69, No. 423, January 1851
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
When it is said that the effect of Californian gold will be to reverse
all this--to reduce gradually, and probably before twenty years have
elapsed, _half the weight of debt and taxes_ now felt as so grievous a
burden by the community--it is affirmed that it will confer, perhaps,
the greatest blessing which a beneficent Providence could confer on a
suffering world. In England it will gradually and to a certain extent,
so far as average prices are concerned, undo all that the Bullionists
and Free-traders have been doing for the last thirty years. It will
remove a large part of the frightful evils consequent on the monetary
measures of Sir Robert Peel; and if seconded by a revision of our
import duties, and a moderate tax for fiscal purposes on all foreign
articles brought into the country, it would go far to repair the
devastation produced by the selfish legislation of the last thirty
years. In France it will arrest that dreadful fall of wages which, ever
since the peace, has been felt to be increasing, from the constant
reduction of prices arising from the destruction of the South American
mines, and the simultaneous measures adopted for the contraction of
the currency in Great Britain. The unjust monopoly of realised capital
will be arrested, at least for a long period. The unjust depression
of industry, by the continued fall of prices, will be gradually
terminated. But so gradual will be the change, and so unseen the
operation of the vivifying element thus let into society, that even the
classes most benefited by it will, for the most part, be ignorant of
the cause to which their improved circumstances have been owing. They
will be blessed by the hand of Nature, they know not how or by whom,
as, under the former system, they were cursed by the hand of man, they
knew not how or by whom.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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