In the first place, the common notion that the draining of gold out of the country is intrinsically, and in all cases, an evil, is nothing but a political superstition—a superstition in part descended from the antique fallacy that money is the only wealth, and in part from the maxims of an artificial, law-produced state of things, under which the exportation of gold really _was_ a sign of a corrupted currency: we mean, during the suspension of cash-payments. Law having cancelled millions of contracts which it was its duty to enforce—law having absolved bankers from liquidating their promises-to-pay in coin, having rendered it needless to keep a stock of coin with which to liquidate them, and having thus taken away that natural check which prevents the over-issue and depreciation of notes—law having partly suspended that _home_ demand for gold which ordinarily competes with and balances the _foreign_ demand; there resulted an abnormal exportation of gold. By-and-by it {342} was seen that this efflux of gold was a consequence of the over-issue of notes; and that the accompanying high price of gold, as paid for in notes, proved the depreciation of notes. And then it became an established doctrine that an adverse state of the foreign exchanges, indicating a drain of gold, was significant of an excessive circulation of notes; and that the issue of notes should be regulated by the state of the exchanges. This unnatural condition of the currency having continued for a quarter of a century, the concomitant doctrine rooted itself in the general mind. And now mark one of the multitudinous evils of legislative meddling. This artificial test, good only for an artificial state, has survived the return to a natural state; and men’s ideas about currency have been reduced by it to chronic confusion.