PRICE OF BULLION per Ounce, in the London Market, during the Six Sorts of Bullion. July. Portugal Gold £. s. d. £. s. d. £. s. d. £. s. d. £. s. d. £. s. d. Coin... 0 0 0 4 17 6 4 16 6 4 17 9 4 19 0 4 19 0 Standard Gold in 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 4 17 9 4 19 0 4 19 0 Bars.... New Doubloons 4 12 6 4 14 44 12 6 4 14 14 15 6 4 15 4 N. B. The MINT PRICE, per Ounce, of the Standard Gold and Silver Bullion is as follows: Standard Gold in Bars, £.3 17s. 104d. Standard Silver in Bars; 5s. 2d. The other sorts of Bullion, except the Portugal Gold Coin, are below Standard Value. The Prices in the above table is the Market Price in Bank of England Notes. Sugar 33 9435 34 32 94 36 4442 443 94 Cwt. 020 0 Bushel October December To July 23 October ...... 819 934 872 63 November.......... December......... 631 63 Total Christenings... 1 0, 6 8 8. Average Prices of CORN, through all England and Wales, and of HAY, STRAW, and best FARNHAM HOPS, in London, from July to December 1811, both Months inclusive. Corn per Quarter of 8 Winchester Bushels. Right Hon. Robert Saunders Dundas (now President of the Board of Controul for the Af fairs of India. Vice-President of the Board of Trade, and Treasurer of the Navy. Secretary at War. Joint Paymaster-General of the Forces. Joint Postmaster-General. Secretaries to the Treasury. Master of the Rolls. Attorney-General. Solicitor-General. VOL. XX. No. 1.] LONDON, SATURDAY, JULY 6, 1.. Price 15. "Nothing is more certain than death, and nothing more uncertain than the time of dying ?" "yot, we can always fix a period beyond which man cannot live, and within some moment of which he will « die. We are enabled to do this, not by any spirit of prophecy, but by observation of what has happened in all cases of human or animal existence. If, then, any other subject, such, for instance, "as a system of finance, exhibits, in its progress, a series of symptoms indicating decay, its final "dissolution is certain, and, from those symptoms we may calculate the period of that dissolution."PAINE. Decline and Fall of the British System of Finance, published in 1796. PAPER AGAINST GOLD: BEING AN EXAMINATION OF THE Report of the Bullion Committee: IN A SERIES OF LETTERS TO THE TRADESMEN AND FARMERS LETTER XXV. The Subject of Depreciation discussed - Lord Stanhope's Bill-Lord King's Notice to kis Tenants. GENTLEMEN, [2 have fallen in value, and, of course, that any given sum in such notes is not worth so much as it formerly was. Much puzzling has, upon this subject, arisen from a very natural cause; namely, that the note always retains its nominal value; that is to say, always goes by the same name; a pound note still is called a pound note, whether it be worth as much as it formerly was, or not. But, to this point we shall come more fully by-and-bye, after we have spoken of the way in which a depreciation of money, or the lowering of the value of money, takes place. Money, of whatever sort, is, like every thing else, lowered in its value in proportion as it becomes abundant or plenty. As I said upon a former occasion, when apples are plenty apples are cheap; and cheap means low in price. The use of money is to serve men as a sign of the amount of the value of things that pass from man to man in the way of purchase and sale. It is plenty, or scarce, in proportion as its quantity is great or small compared with the quantity of things purchased and sold in the community; and, whenever it becomes, from any cause, plenty, it depre THE foregoing Letter we began with proposing to discuss the question of depreciation, but were stopped by the desire of showing how childish, and, indeed, how unjust it was in our government to complain of the endeavours said to be used by the French for destroying our papermoney, seeing the endeavours which were used here to destroy the Assignats in France. We will now resume the subject of depreciation, and see whether the paper-ciates, or sinks in value. Suppose, for inmoney of England be, or be not, actually depreciated; and, if we find that it is, we will inquire whether it can be restored to its former value by any of the means, called remedies, that have been pointed out by any of those who are our rulers; or lawgivers. To depreciate means to lower in value; and the word depreciation is used to signify that state, in which any thing is, when it is lowered, or has fallen, from its former value. Hence the term depreciation, as applied to Bank Notes; and, when we thus apply it, accompanied with the affirmative of the proposition, we say, that Bank Notes stance, that there is a community of ten men, who make amongst them 100 purchases in a year, each purchase amounting to 1 pound. The community, in that case, would possess, we will suppose, 10 pounds; and no more, because, the same money might, and naturally would, go backwards and forwards, and because, except under peculiar circumstances, men do not hoard. Now, suppose, that the money in possession of this community is doubled in quantity, without any other alteration taking place, the quantity of goods and chattels and the quantity of things, including services, purchased and the number of purchases all continuing B the same. Suppose this; and, we are here speaking of money of any sort. No matter what sort. Suppose it to be gold, and that its quantity is thus doubled. The consequence would be, of course, that at each of the hundred purchases, double the sum would be given that was given before; because, if this were not the case, part of the money must be kept idle, which, upon a general scale, can never be, there being no motive for it. Suppose that one of the hundred purchases was that of a horse. The purchase, which was made with 1 pound before the doubling of the quantity of money, would require 2 pounds after that doubling took place; and so on through the whole; and, in such a state of things people would say, that prices had risen, that commodities had doubled in price, that every thing was twice as dear as it used to be. But, the fact would be, that money was become plenty, and, like every thing else, cheap in pro portion to its abundance. It would be, that money had fallen, or had been depreciated, and not that things had risen; the loaf, for instance, having a real value in its utility in supporting man, and the money having only an imaginary value. 66 Prices in England have been rising, as it is commonly called, for hundreds of years; things have been getting dearer and dearer. The cause of which, until the bank note system began, was the increase of gold and silver in Europe, in consequence of the discovery of South America and the subsequent working of the mines. But the increase of the quantity of gold and silver was slow. "Nature," as PAINE observes, gives those materials out with a "sparing hand;" they came, as they still come, in regular annual quantities from the mines; and that portion of them which found its way to this country was obtained by the sale of things of real value, being the product of our soil or of our labour. Therefore, the quantity of money increased very slowly; it did increase, and prices gradually rose, but the increase and the rise were so slow as not to be strik ingly perceptible. During the average life of man the rise in prices was so small as hardly to attract any thing like general attention. Curious men observed it, and some of them recorded the progress of prices; but, as there was no sensible difference in prices in the average life of man, the rise never became an object of general interest, as long as gold and silver were the only currency of the country. But, when the funding system began, and paper became, in many cases, a substitute for gold and silver; when the increase of the quantity of money in the country was no longer dependent upon the mines; when the check which nature had provided was removed; then money, or its substitute, paper, increased at a rate much greater than before, and prices took a proportionate rise, as they naturally would. The nature of the FUNDING SYSTEM has been fully explained before; we have also seen how it would naturally cause the paper-money to go on increas ing. We have seen, that the government, as soon as it began to make loans, was compelled to establish a Bank, or a something, in order to get the means of paying the interest upon the loans. The amount of the loans would naturally go on increasing in order to meet the rise in prices, and thus the increase of the paper would continue causing rise after rise in the prices, and the rise in the prices would continue causing addition upon addition to the quantity of the paper. This was the natural progress, and it was that which actually took place. Still, however, the paper passed in company with the gold and silver. Money was more plenty; it was of less value; and, of course, any given quantity of it would purchase less bread, for instance, than formerly; but, still there was no difference in the quality of the two sorts of money; metal and paper both not only passed at the sums that they had usually passed at; but people liked the one just as well as the other; and, it was a matter of perfect indifference to any man, whether he took a hundred guineas in gold, or one hundred and five pounds in paper. And, the reason of this indifference was, that the holder of a bank note could, at any moment, go to the Bank, and there demand and receive payment in guineas. This was the reason why the paper passed in society with the gold. But, it was impossible that this society should long continue after the paper increased to a very great amount, and especially after the notes became so low in nominal value as 5 pounds; for, then, it was evident, that all the taxes would be paid in paper; that the government would receive nothing but paper; that the Bank could get nothing but paper from the government; that whatever gold went out of the Bank would never return to it; and, of course, |