What, for example, were the reasons which determined the premium on gold in 1885, under the first Presidency of General Roca? Was it, by any chance, that any economic calamity fell upon the country? Were the harvests lost? or was there a foreign war, or even one of those revolutionary risings so common among the South American nations? Did the germs of some epidemic invade the country, decimating the population by disease and poverty? Was there any violent and ruinous fall in the market prices of Argentine products? Nothing of the kind befell. The Government itself, in the message in which it solicited the ratification of the double standard, that “the national production, the valuation and the degree of culture of the soil, had consolidated the national credit.” The crops were abundant; and their prices, in foreign markets, were more than fair. The Republic was at peace, at home and abroad; thus realising one of the dreams of the paternal administration which directed its destinies. As for the public health, it suffered no perceptible eclipse in all the Argentine Territory. It has also been said that the commercial balances were unfavourable to the Argentine: a country at once a debtor and a centre of immigration. And it has been asserted, too, that the Republic suffered from a sudden increase of growth, without having behind it any reserves of accumulated capital. The affirmation that the depreciation of the currency, and in consequence the establishment of a double standard, arose from unfavourable commercial balances, has no scientific basis and is not supported by precise demonstration. “None of the countries which have suffered the misfortune of a depreciated currency have reached that condition purely on account of adverse balances,” as a Spanish economist, Señor Edouardo Sans y Escartin, has said with justice. All countries have suffered from this evil, on account of monetary changes, and the Argentine is only the latest example. France towards the end of the eighteenth century, England from 1797 to 1821, Austria and Russia since the beginning of the last century, the United States from 1862 to 1878, Italy since 1875, Paraguay since 1870, and the Hispano-American Republics for the last twenty-five years: all these countries have suffered from monetary perturbations, some through the abuse of paper money or the excess of the fiduciary circulation, others through the variations of the relation of gold to silver. In none of these countries did the crisis take the form of the consequence of unfavourable commercial balances. We find, in fact, that it is not the case that economic causes, resulting either from the formative period the country has traversed, or from its lack of accumulated capital, have contributed and are still contributing in the Argentine Republic to prolong the system of inconversion; the causes are exclusively financial and administrative, as we have already maintained.[109]