Page:McCosh, John - Advice to Officers in India (1856).djvu/318

 diggings, property,provisions and wages of every description have all risen to double, treble, or quadruple, what they were a few years before it. Gold,like everything else in the world has become depreciated by its very abundance; and what was enough to support an establishment five years ago, is now only one-fifth enough. A ditcher or a breaker of stones on the roads, earns his fifteen or twenty shillings a day; a carpenter, a mason, or a blacksmith, twenty-five to thirty shillings. A boatman will not row a passenger and his light kit of baggage from ship to shore under half a sovereign, a porter will not trundle it to his hotel under five shillings, nor can he exist at a respectable hotel under a pound a day, nor yet a hackney-coach to drive a mile to a friend's to dine under a sovereign. Everybody has his head turned with gold; they eat their gold, drink their gold,and dream over their gold;their inns and omnibuses, and steamboats, are called after the golden fleece, the golden fly, and the golden age—but they have no golden mean. The fable of the goose and the golden eggs, and the tree with the golden apples,are no fables here,for every egg and every apple is worth a nugget of gold. Extortion without moderation, and accommodation without comfort, meet the stranger wherever he goes; enormous wages become necessary to meet such enormous demands, and though