Now, the increased production of the mines cannot be the only cause of this great perturbation in prices. It commenced, in most countries, at a time when the supplies from America were still too small to account for such an effect. One of the chief causes of the phenomenon was, that precisely at this period, there was in so many nations a transition from a sluggish circulation of money, made still more sluggish by the custom which everywhere prevailed of hoarding treasure, to a rapid circulation, which was made still more rapid by the use of all kinds of substitutes for money. (§ 123).(849) In the earliest ripe fruit of European civilization (Italy), this transition had long been accomplished; and, on that account, the value in exchange of the precious metals was there, for a long time previous, comparatively low.(850) From the second third of the seventeenth century, the value of the medium of circulation seems, on the whole, to have remained stationary.(851) Tooke seeks to demonstrate the steady decline of the value of money until late in the eighteenth century, from the fact that the wages of labor increased during that time; but I should rather connect the latter phenomenon with the simultaneous elevation of the classes engaged in manual labor. And so Adam Smith infers a rise in the price of money after the beginning of the eighteenth century, from the prices of wheat;(852) but it would be better to consider the cause of this to be the unusually long series of good crops.(853) An equally unusually long series of bad harvests, during the second half of the century, accounts satisfactorily for the simultaneous rise of the medium prices of corn. The great war which lasted from 1793 to 1815, too, according to a very prevalent opinion, must have caused the value of money to decline; a fact which is generally accredited to the increase of paper money in so many states. Every great war may very easily have for effect to slacken the speed of the circulation of money, to promote the hoarding and even the burial of treasure for a rainy day, and to paralyze credit and its power to supply the place of money. Hence, it seems preferable to seek for the cause of the variations in price, during the great war, in the commodities themselves whose price was affected; since their production must have been enormously disturbed. It rendered the brawniest men and the most powerful horses unproductive, and even employed them as agents of destruction. It interrupted trade in a thousand ways, or drove it into unnatural channels, and turned the intellectual interests of nations into every direction save that of economic industry. To this must be added the absence of security everywhere.(854)