Page:Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, A - Karl Marx.djvu/254

Rh commodities were cheap and money was dear. The trouble, according to an English writer, was "the ruinously low prices of our manufactures and of our colonial productions under the operation . . . of the 'Continental System' during the last six years of the war. . . . The prices of sugar and coffee, for instance, on the Continent, computed in gold, were four or five times higher than their prices in England, computed in banknotes. I am speaking . . . of the times in which the French chemists discovered sugar in beet-root, and a substitute for coffee in chicory; and when the English grazier tried experiments upon fattening oxen with treacle and molasses—of the times when we took possession of the island of Heligoland, in order to form there a depot of goods to facilitate, if possible, the smuggling of them into the north of Europe; and when the lighter descriptions of British manufactures found their way into Germany through Turkey. . . . Almost all the merchandise of the world accumulated in our warehouses, where they became impounded, except when some small quantity was released by a French License, for which the merchants at Hamburgh and Amsterdam had, perhaps, given Napoleon such a sum as forty or fifty thousand pounds. They must have been strange merchants. . . to have paid so large a sum for liberty to carry a cargo of goods from a dear market to a cheap one. What was the ostensible alternative the merchant had? . . . Either to buy coffee at 6d. a pound in bank-notes, and send it to a place where it would instantly sell at 3s. or 4s. a pound in gold, or to buy gold with bank-notes at £5 an ounce, and send it