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84 market of money, which is affected by the same causes that produce fluctuations in all other markets, and also by some peculiar to itself, arising out of the financial institutions and arrangements of different countries. With regard, again, to the scarcity of money felt by individuals, that is a complaint likely, for obvious reasons, to be just as rife in a time of active and profitable commercial speculation, when every man able to procure the command of capital can turn it to good account, as in a stagnant or decaying state of trade, when capital can be employed with comparatively little advantage.

Some further information in proof of the continued increase of the trade and wealth of the kingdom is supplied to us at a date a few years later by another eminent authority, Sir William Petty, in his " Political Arithmetic," first published in 1676. This writer's statements and conclusions with regard to the progress of the national prosperity for the preceding forty years strikingly coincide with and confirm those of Sir Josiah Child. He observes that in these forty years the taxes and other public pecuniary levies in the three kingdoms had been much greater than they ever were before, and yet they had undeniably all three gradually increased in wealth and strength within that space. The number of houses in London was double what it was forty years before; and there had also been a great increase of houses at Newcastle, Yarmouth, Norwich, Exeter, Portsmouth, and Cowes; as also in Ireland, in the towns of Dublin, Kinsale, Coleraine, and Londonderry. Then, with respect to shipping, the royal navy was now double or quadruple what it had been forty years ago; and the coal-shipping of Newcastle now amounted to about 80,000 tons, or probably four times what it then was, seeing that London did not then contain more than half the inhabitants it now did; while the use of coals was also doubled,—"they being heretofore," says Sir William, "seldom used in chambers, as they now are, nor were there so many bricks burnt with them as of late, nor did the country on both sides the Thames make use of them as now." "Above 40,000 ton of shipping," he