It is now ascertained, therefore, by the only sure guide in political science--experience--that if no addition to the circulating medium of the globe had been made at a time when so immense an increment was going forward in the numbers and transactions of the most active part of mankind, consequences the most disastrous to human industry and happiness _must_ have taken place. If--when the United States, with their population of 25,000,000 doubling every twenty-five years, and Russia, with its population of 66,000,000 doubling every forty years, and Great Britain, with its population of 29,000,000 doubling in about the same time, and its exports and imports tripling in thirty years, were in a state of full and undiminished activity--there had been no addition made to the circulating medium of the globe, it is difficult to estimate the amount of embarrassment and distress which must have become all but universal. If the circulating medium of the earth had _remained stationary_, or gone on receiving only its wonted annual increment, when so prodigious an addition was going forward in the numbers and transactions of men, a universal and progressive fall of prices must have ensued. The remuneration of industry must have been halved--the weight of debts and taxes doubled. The fatal increase in the value and power of riches, so truly felt and loudly complained of in the declining days of the Roman empire, would have been everywhere experienced. A _money famine_ would have been universally felt; and, paradoxical as it may appear, dear-bought experience has now taught us that such a famine is attended with more disastrous, because more widely spread and irremovable, consequences, than even a shortcoming in the supply of food for the use of man. The latter may be removed by increased rural activity and a good harvest in a single year. But the former is susceptible of no such remedy. On the contrary, the augmented activity which it brings on, from the general and pinching suffering with which it is attended, only tends to aggravate the common distress, because it multiplies the transactions in which money as a medium of exchange is indispensable, and consequently makes its scarcity in proportion to the existing demand be more severely felt.