In this chapter I am but repeating much of what I have urged in former chapters, but I am naturally anxious to make my argument as strong as possible by the help of wider and, I trust, clearer illustrations as I proceed. When we travel over a wide tract of country our vision is too weak to take in all its topographical features. We can see general features, but not the minute features which the botanist and the geologist would examine. The poet would see what the geologist would not see, and the botanist would see what would escape the naturalist. So when we take a survey of the economic and financial world we see a mechanism which is not the same when examined minutely as when looked at from a distance. When we look at it from afar we cannot see those defects which on close examination we are able to find. If rates of interest arbitrarily rise and fall, and the supply of capital is controlled in an arbitrary way, the general well-being of the community must be affected. We suffer when the monopolist takes advantage of the helplessness of the community to raise prices. We suffer when shipowners take advantage of accidental circumstances to raise freights and the price of food. We suffer when the colliery proprietors in the depth of winter raise the price of coal. We suffer also when the banks raise the rate of interest, thereby raising prices and affecting employment. When prices rise, as they have almost uniformly risen in recent years, many theories are advanced as to the causes of this. Some attribute it to the increased output of gold. They mean by this that the output of gold has increased so greatly that more money, or more purchasing power, is placed in the hands of the community. Producers, observing this, raise the prices of their commodities. If this were so, the advance in prices would be general, and we should be no worse or better off than when prices are low. Wages would inevitably advance if prices were affected by this universal, not local cause. But it is asserted that wages have not advanced uniformly, while tradesmen on their part declare that their profits have fallen. Workmen and tradesmen alike say that they are poorer than they were ten and twenty years ago, and the housewife declares that a sovereign now will only go as far as fifteen or ten shillings went years back. It is impossible to prove that such a rise is a consequence of an accelerated production of gold. It is an hypothesis, and an hypothesis it will remain, for it ignores a multitude of causes more important in their aggregate effect than gold.