your allegiance: and yet-plague take it! I doubt whether, as the old song says, I can find forces enough to rebel. Ah, Meg, thou little witch, truly, thy spell is potent, more potent even than gold. So basely, after all our braves, We have to own ourselves your slaves; We still drag after us our chain. APPENDIX. I CANNOT refrain from calling the reader's attention to the following remarkable passage descriptive of the auri sacra fames, from R. H. Patterson's Economy of Capital. "In the spring of 1854 there was discovered in Australia one of the richest 'placers' or gold beds, even of that most auriferous country. The spot was a deep ravine, formed by the Buckland river, enclosed by steep mountain sides which excluded every breath of wind. It was autumn in Australia, though spring here. The air in the ravine was stagnant, and the scorching sun made it intensely hot during the day, while at night the temperature fell to a piercing cold, so that the sojourners in the ravine were alternately in an oven and an ice house. Moreover, as the gold beds lay in the channel of the river, the miners worked up to their waists in water. To this gold field of surpassing richness hundreds of adventurers flocked in feverish haste : but disease, like the fabled dragons and griffins of old, kept horrid sentry over the buried treasures. A peculiar fever, of the typhoid character, was the natural denizen of the spot besides which the gold seekers suffered severely from eye-blight, owing to the concentrated blaze of the sunshine reflected from the steep sides of the ravine, and they were at all times grievously tormented by clouds of flies. Bad diet and want of vegetables aggravated the diseases natural to the place and to the kind of work. In the strangely inter K esting accounts which then reached us, we read of onions selling at six shillings a pound: and cabbages which we buy here for a penny were so precious that they were eat up and sold by weight-from half a crown to four shillings the pound being readily paid for them. Physic, or what passed for it, rose in price in a still more startling manner-Holloway's pills selling at one shilling each, or a guinea per box! It was a Valley of Death. 'Constitutions that had borne the hardships of other fields broke down here,' wrote an eye-witness of the scene; and hundreds have perished, dying unattended and unknown. The little levels between the stream and the base of the mountain wall, for ten miles along the valley, are so thickly studded with graves that the river appears to run through a churchyard.' One new-comer, wiser than the rest, having counted eleven corpses carried past his tent during the dinner hour of his first working day, and thinking that even gold may be purchased too dearly, left the place instantly. Many abandoned it after a somewhat longer trial. But the greater number, fascinated by the unusual richness of the gold beds, remained in defiance of disease, and 'took their chance'-with what result the numerous graves of the valley testify to this day. It was a scene 'to point a moral or adorn a tale."" WHY has Gold this magic attraction that conquers even the fear of death? BECAUSE it is not a mere commodity, but the vehicle of demand for all commodities, and hence itself in inexhaustible demand. BY THE SAME AUTHOR. Crown 8vo., cloth, 382 pp., price 7s. 6d. W. H. ALLEN AND Co., LONDON. Medium 8vo. cloth, 256 pp. price 10s. 6d. THE PRINCIPLE OF WEALTH CREATION: ITS NATURE, ORIGIN, EVOLUTION, AND COROLLARIES: BEING A CRITICAL RECONSTRUCTION OF SCIENTIFIC POLITICAL ECONOMY. JAS. PARKER AND Co., OXFORD AND LONDON. IN PREPARATION: STRUCTURE AND FUNCTION: OR, THE SPIRIT OF ECONOMY, NATURAL AND PO LITICAL. |