2. That the increased silver production of twenty-two years would reduce its value in the exact mathematical proportions of the increase. This theory ignores the two most important facts determining the value of money: that the silver or gold mined in any one year is added to the existing stock, to which it is but a minute increase; and that wealth, population, and production are also increasing rapidly, relative to which the increase of silver is but a trifle indeed. The yield of the Monte Real a thousand years ago may have cost five times as much labor per ounce, and that of Laurium ten or even twenty times as much; but all of both which is not lost goes with the last ounce mined into the general stock, which is now about $4,000,000,000 in coin alone. The greatest annual production has in but a very few cases added so much as 3 per cent. to the stock on hand, and about half of it is consumed in the arts. If the increase of the annual production of silver by 2-3/4 to 1 in twenty-two years reduced its value one-half, will the _Times_ tell us what should have been the reduction in the value of gold when this product increased by fivefold in eight years? It should further be noted that the discovery of a "Big Bonanza" is an event so rare that it has not happened, on an average, more than once in three centuries since the dawn of history, and that since 1873 the growth in the world's production and trade has been, relative to former times, even greater than the increase in the production of silver. Consider the following facts, which I have condensed from Mulhall: In 1800 the total yearly international commerce of the world was estimated at $1,510,000,000. Forty years later it had only increased 90 per cent., amounting in 1840 to $2,865,000,000, and in that year there were in all the world but 4,315 miles of railroad and no electric telegraph. The total horse-power of all the steamships of the world was but 330,000, and the carrying power of all the shipping but 10,482,000 tons. To-day the international commerce of the world is almost $20,000,000,000, and increasing at the rate of $1,000,000,000 per year; there are in the world over 400,000 miles of railway and a very much greater mileage of magnetic telegraph, including 14 intercontinental cables; the ocean tonnage of Great Britain alone is very much greater than was that of the whole world in 1840; and tremendous as this increase of international trade has been, it is the merest trifle compared with the increase of the internal trade in several of the greater nations.