of

very worst form in the shape of the Bank Charter Act. These accidents, like Mr. Sam Weller's knowledge of London, are 'extensive and peculiar.' But Nemesis limps after legislators whose career is constructed accidents like these; she may take her time, but still she arrives. Posterity will require something more in a candidate for the much profaned epithet of statesman than a mind always sufficiently open to conviction' to render its unlucky owner the catspaw of persons who knew what he was doing much better than he did himself. If a 'quarter of a century' leaves the mind still the same political shuttlecock that it found it, destitute of, because incapable of forming, an original principle founded on the comprehension of the economical tendencies and needs of the age, but open and ready at all times to adopt by conviction' specious and plausible theories that run counter to your whole

career and the ties and pledges of party, simply from the general motive of benevolence to your kind—if this it is to be a statesman, there is never an old lady in England who is not a statesman and party leader of the highest order. The piloti who shapes his course, not by navigation and the compass, but the casual advice or bullying of amateur passengers, may be a most estimable man, no doubt; the pride of his family and the ornament of the domestic circle; but the Company that insured his ships would soon go bankrupt.

But suddenly came a bolt from the blue, a real accident: the discovery of gold in Australia and California. That gold saved England's commercial prosperity from the

People who want to know what a statesman is should read the life of Mr. Horace Bixby, in Mark Twain's wonderful book 'Life on the Mississippi.' It is the finest portrait of a master in politics to be found in literature.

consequences of Peel's restrictive legislation; partly by its positive supply (it acted instead of the silver, and served as a basis for notes), and partly by frightening other nations, and preventing them, for the time, from copying England and adopting the single gold standard. The two laws of Peel had narrowed the currency to its lowest possible minimum: and the condition of England was more than deplorable she was dying of inanition. The copious gold that poured in from the mines came just in time to avert a social catastrophe that would have ruined her k. The flood of prosperity that followed has drowned the recollection of the miserable state which preceded it. And yet there is a farcical side to the event. To those who had made it the goal of all their efforts to screw up the

* See, for a fuller analysis of this period, R. H. Patterson's New Golden Age: or my own Principle of WealthCreation.

value of gold, this apparently infinite deluge of gold came like a dish of cold water from the ironical power who sits up aloft and scoffs at the vanity of human endeavour. They started back in dismay, as men leap back from a precipice suddenly yawning at their feet out of the dark, or a hobgoblin grinning in their face in the gloom. The Political Economists who were to the fore at that time poured their terrified abuse in full stream on that gold which saved us from ruin. They published elaborate books to warn an unconscious world of the hideous calamities coming upon it-nay, which according to their theories must have been even then in full operation, from the 'probable fall in the value of gold:' books in which the theories advanced were flatly contradicted even by the very facts adduced to support them. No doubt, had Peel still been living, his 'open mind' would have

abolished his gold standard in obedience to the new theories of Cobden and Chevalier 1.

Their prophecy turned out to be pure nonsense, utterly falsified by the event; and so it has been conveniently smothered away, and nobody now pays any regard to it, or seeks to draw attention that way. But this is a very great error. It deserves all the attention we can give it. Instead of being hidden under a bushel, it ought, on the contrary, to be bellowed from the housetops, that POLITICAL ECONOMY DELIBER

ATELY STAKED THE TRUTH OF ITS THEORY

1 Money being a commodity, and subject to the ordinary laws of commodities, must,—so MM. Chevalier and Cobden argued, -fall in value enormously owing to the immense new supply: hence the disasters. But at the very time they wrote more than two hundred and forty millions of gold had flooded the world,—and yet where were the fatal consequences that should have arrived? Observe, this is crucial. The Economists said: If A is, B is. But B was not. Therefore A was not money was NOT a commodity, according to their own proof.