Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/512

496 and this figure was passed in the following years. The case is not different with lead, the production of which, 104,000 tons in 1830 and 170,500 tons in 1850, passed 379,000 tons in 1880, or was more than doubled in thirty years. The production of iron has doubled in ten years, and that of coal increased about 145 per cent in twenty years.

We might pursue this enumeration almost to infinity. If, however, instead of studying the special and precise cause of the depression in the price of each article, we seek the more general causes, they are easy to find. The question of the metal silver is foreign to them. The general causes may be reduced to the following: The whole world is much better explored than it was twenty years ago, and all the natural riches, the best lands, and the best deposits, are better known. Capital, having become more abundant, is more mobile and more active, bolder, more ready to change places, and more transportable than it was a quarter of a century ago, so that the simple announcement of the discovery of a new source of wealth at any place in the world almost immediately induces attempts to make it available. The rise of anonymous business societies, or companies, has an importance of which we are hardly yet beginning to take account; the substitution of this powerful collective force for the molecular forces of personal and isolated capital has transformed and sometimes decupleddecoupled [sic] the efficacy of investment. Men also have become less sedentary, and eagerly follow their capital wherever it calls them and promises them remuneration. The progress of industry, manifested by inventions, discoveries, improved processes, and even workmen's slights, is contributing daily to this incessant development of production and cheapening of prices. The last factor, and not the least energetic one, is the improvement of the means of transportation, especially by sea, during the last fifteen years, by virtue of which it is calculated that every English ship can now carry twice as much freight as in 1870, three times as much as in 1860, and four times as much as in 1850.

These are the general and incontestable causes which have acted, and are continuing to act, upon the provisioning of the world. To seek the explanation of the fall of prices anywhere else is willfully to close one's eyes. It is vain to pretend that the fall of silver, which amounts to twenty-two per cent of the value given it in our monetary tariff, gives the Indies an advantage in exportation. Amid phenomena so vast and striking, this is only an insignificant detail. The greater part of the goods which have drooped in price are not produced in countries having a silver standard. The great marts of production of copper, for example, are not in the East, but in the West—in Spain and the United States. So with iron and with wool, which is peculiarly the product of countries having a gold standard. Sugar and cotton, also, are most largely produced in countries where the fall in silver can have no direct influence.

It would be well if we could come to an understanding of the real