The effect of the Californian and Australian gold mines has been compared to that of the silver mines of South America at two periods—when their treasures began to be distributed in Europe, and again when the abundance and cheapness of quicksilver increased their productiveness;—but there is one difference at least, viz., that under the greatly more active life of the present age, as compared with the 16th and 17th centuries, the results of the Californian and Australian gold discoveries were much more rapidly developed than in the other case, and may be said to have passed and been exhausted under the eyes of a single generation. We should thus be better able to judge the effect of sudden, though, as they prove, always temporary increases of the supplies of the precious metals.
The two events in question were almost coincident, and they came when a general extension of trade had already been ten years in progress. The first effect was to produce a great emigration to the countries in which the gold-fields were situated, and this was followed by large exports of goods to the same quarters, which, as usually happens when business falls under speculative impulses out of the ordinary mercantile course, were much overdone, and ended eventually in heavy loss to the shippers. Abundance of labour had been supplied to the gold-fields with unwonted celerity, and as the labour was not unremunerative, and in many cases was even rewarded by large findings of gold, the commotion in emigration, traffic, and shipping was sustained for a considerable time. The coffers of the banks of England and France were soon filled with the new supplies of gold, and these imparted increased confidence to banking operations by which they were as soon redistributed. All this was calculated to give additional impulse and extension to the commercial forces already in motion. There was a new increase of demand for goods; much labour had been transferred from old seats of industry to new fields; and there was rise of wages, and rise of prices. But whether the effects would have been different whatever other produce than gold had been the impelling cause may be much doubted. The effect of increased supplies of the precious metals per se on prices is difficult to trace, and is seldom detected by the keenest analysis, more especially in a period of extending trade and industry, for the precious metals are then more quickly absorbed, and many causes, of which their increased supply is but one and the least, are operating on the value of goods. The Californian and Australian mines remain productive, though in much diminished amount, and their most permanent effect on commerce will probably be found to be that they helped materially to build California into a populous State, which has become one of the largest granaries of wheat in the world, and to make the Australian colonies a growing empire, of such varied resources that its foreign trade, greatly as it had increased in the first ten years of the gold discoveries, continued to increase in the subsequent ten years, when its produce of gold had declined into a subordinate interest.
Immensely important as the creative and stimulating effect of the free trade of Britain and the Californian and Australian gold discoveries had been, they pale before a mighty service that remains to be noticed, and which, in the prolific force of a world aroused to commerce, they had all the while been carrying forward in their train.
There is little need of remark in this place on steam ships, railways, and telegraphs—equally marvellous in their power of facilitating commerce and in the rapidity of their construction to this end—beyond a simple indication. The words alone convey what an age we have been living in, and what the international progress in commerce must have been. In 1839 the ocean steamers in the world, if any, could have been counted on one's fingers. In the United Kingdom alone there are now 1597 steam vessels, of nearly 1000 average tonnage, wholly employed in foreign trade. All the greater maritime states have lines of ocean steamers, and there is scarce any part of the world to which goods and passengers are not carried with the speed, regularity, and capacity which steam-power has given to navigation. That goods might be hauled overland by steam was only deemed possible when George Stephenson opened the first short railway in England in 1825. There are now 17,000 miles of railway in the United Kingdom, or one mile of steam-road to every seven square miles of area, carrying both goods and passengers with the ease and celerity of this new system. A similar work has been done in other civilized nations, and over many thousands of miles of comparatively desert tracts of country. The only densely-peopled quarter of the world unknown to railway enterprize is China, and in China a short railway has just been opened from Shanghai to Woosung, amid the curiosity and welcome of the populace. The rapid development of telegraphy is more wonderful even than that of steam ships or railways. Difficult problems of pure science, of science applied to art, and of material manufacture, had to be solved and tested at every step, and all this had to be done with the slightest attractions to capital on the stock exchange. Yet the telegraph wires have been laid successfully under the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Eastern Seas, and there remain now but few parts of the commercial world to which messages may not be sent and answers received within a few hours. These wondrous and wondrously combined powers of science and mechanism have realized, in the highest form conceivable to the practical mind, the facility of transport and the means of rapid communication and intelligence which commerce had been seeking at infinite distance from the beginning of time, but seeking in vain. Their influence on the interior economy of commonwealths has been no less marked than on the exterior distribution of their products. They are the work of less than half a century, and yet to form them has cost tens of thousands of millions sterling of capital. On whatever side the question is considered, nothing less than marvels are presented to our reason. For supposing these achievements possible, the science, art, and labour prepared and ready, where was the wealth to be found to accomplish them? It may be said that steam ships, railways, and telegraphs have been called into existence by the rising energy and resources of commerce, and it may also be said that at every stage they have created the traffic by which alone they could be sustained and extended.
- ↑ The amount of foreign loans and securities, of a public character, held in the United Kingdom has been variously estimated at from 1000 to 1500 millions sterling.
