In order to show that the United States are not alone in their complaint of falling prices, but that the complaint is universal, and in order that we may have before us a broad view of the field of general prices, I submit a table showing the relation to each other of the range of prices from 1809 to 1849, by decades, based on the prices of fifty leading articles of commerce, prepared by the distinguished Professor Jevons and published in the London Economist for May 8, 1869. Taking the range of prices of 1849 as a datum line (the range for that year being the lowest of the century) Mr. Jevons works backward to 1809, when the revolt of the South American colonies against the authority of Spain shut off at a blow the supplies of the precious metals, and set on foot a money famine from which the world knew no relief till the discovery of the mines of California and Australia. Professor Jevons's figures are as follows, the prices of 1849 being represented by 100: _Relation of prices, 1809 to 1849, by decades, those for 1849 being rated at 100._ 1809 245 1819 175 1829 124 1839 144 1849 100 From these figures it will be observed that the fall from 1809 to 1849, a period of forty years, was as 245 to 100, or 59 per cent. By the next table which I submit, that of Dr. Soetbeer, it will be seen that the general range of prices rose gradually from 1849 to 1873, in the last of which years the figures bore to those of 1849 the relation of 138 to 100. It has never been denied that this rise was due to the increase in the world's money supply by the yield of the precious metals from the mines of California and Australia, the effects of which, however, as will be seen by the table, were not felt on prices till 1853--five years after John Marshall's discovery of the yellow metal in the tail-race at Sutter's mills. Yet, because it interferes with the pecuniary interests of a large and influential class, it is vehemently denied that the fall of prices since 1873 is due to a decrease in the volume of the money caused by the demonetization of silver in that year throughout the western world. From and after that year, as will be perceived by an examination of the figures; in other words, from the year when one-half the world's money supply was deprived of the money function, we find an almost uninterrupted decline of prices. The figures of 1873 and 1885 will be seen to bear to one another the relation of 138 to 108, or a fall of 22 per cent. in twelve years. Should the fall continue at that rate without interruption--and there is no reason apparent why it should not, we shall in forty years have witnessed a decline of 72 per cent. in the general range of prices--a decline considerably greater than that from 1809 to 1849. And these are not the figures of bimetallists or silver "theorists," but of pronounced advocates of the single standard of gold. Where, I would inquire, is the fall of prices to stop?