United States £6,940,000 Australasia 6,225,000 Russia 5,710,200 Mexico 197,000 Germany 48,200 Chili 25,754 Colombia 800,000 Austria 248,000 Venezuela 455,000 Canada 219,000 We need not give the smaller contributions of other countries. There are twenty gold-yielding countries in all, but eight of them yield an aggregate of little over half a million sterling. As regards the employment of gold, it is estimated that fifteen million pounds-worth annually is required for ornament and employment in the arts and manufactures. This, on the production of 1881, would leave only six and a half million pounds-worth for coining purposes each year. No greater proof of the universal desire of man to possess gold could be afforded than by the heterogeneous mass of peoples who flocked to the gold-diggings. Men of every colour, of every religion, and from every clime, were drawn thither by the attraction of the yellow metal. It is not too much to say that nothing else could have concentrated on one object so many diverse elements. And it may be said further, that but for the discoveries of gold, the rich wheat-plains of California and the verdant pastures of Australia might have been lying to this day waste and unproductive. Mr Hogarth Patterson has attempted to prove that to this increase in our supplies of gold is due the unparalleled expansion of the commerce of the world within the present generation. We do not need to accept this extreme view, while we can clearly perceive that the volume of gold has not proved the dead-weight to strangle us, which other writers had predicted. Mr Patterson may to a certain extent be mixing up cause and effect, but he is nearer the truth than those who refuse to consider gold as one of the first elements of wealth.