There can be little doubt that Thomas Tooke[652] was right in holding the difference between the Mint price and the market price of gold bullion to be the full measure of the effect of this depreciation upon prices, the rest of the increase being due to great demand with small supply, being as a rule much exaggerated and in its worst forms purely local. He pointed out that there was, as a matter of fact, no coincidence between the Bank’s contraction or extension of its issues and the fall or rise of prices in the market outside. Prices rose, for example, in 1795 and 1796, when the Bank’s circulation had been not extended but contracted to meet the commercial crisis; and in 1798, when the Bank’s issues were larger, prices actually fell to what they had been in 1793. Moreover, when some prices went up, others went down. When the prices of provisions went up in 1799 and 1800, the prices of colonial wares went down. The ruling cause (Tooke argues) was not the issue of many or few bank-notes, but scarcity and plenty, especially the plenty of a good harvest and the scarcity of a bad one. Wages in the same way fluctuated rather by the harvests than by the currency, but not by either so much as by the changes in general trade; it would not be true to say that the high or low prices produced high or low wages, but what produced the one produced the other. The recoil of the speculation that followed the Peace brought down both together; there was a glut not only of goods but of hands; and there were the discarded men of the army to swell the numbers of the unemployed. The Luddite outbreaks against machines, as taking work away from the hands, had made a notable beginning in 1812 during the war; in 1816, the year after the Peace, they began again with greater violence. The discussions of Say and Malthus on Over-production, and the reasonings in Ricardo (1817) and James Mill (1821) on Wages and the Wages Fund, are as truly commentaries on these events as the Letter of Cobbett to the Luddites[653] or the volumes of Tooke on Prices.