Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/513

Rh effect of a depreciated currency upon the external commerce of a large country. It is often asserted of India that the depreciation of silver has given it a great advantage, because it can sell its goods at a price which calculated in gold would be less than that charged by competing countries; but, on the other hand, nearly all the finance officers of India and England are suffering from the embarrassments inflicted upon the Indian treasury by this very decline. If we admit the principle that a depreciated currency is an advantage to a country, we should conclude that Russia is never more prosperous than when its ruble declines, the Argentine Republic and Brazil than when their forced paper loses another fraction of its nominal value; and that those countries, like Italy and the United States, which exerted themselves to pass from the régime of paper money and resume specie payments, committed a false step, because, in substituting a strong and stable currency for a weak and variable one, they made exportation more difficult. It may be acknowledged that a slow and gradual depreciation of the value of money may at first aid to a certain extent in the development of exportations. But this is only a transitory phenomenon. All prices will soon come to a level, and salaries and wages will rise; and the temporary advantages accruing to producers and exporters will vanish. If the foreign commerce of India has sensibly expanded within the last fifteen years, we can point out more palpable, precise, and certain causes for the increase than the fall of silver, in the development of the network of railways, the operation of the Suez Canal, with the continual reductions in its tolls, and the cheapening of marine freights. Railroads and steamboats are the great levelers of prices. Add to these the effect of all the improved processes for loading and unloading, such as grain-elevators and all the new port facilities, and we shall find in this whole of circumstances so varied and yet so concordant a cause for the cheapening of goods much less problematical than the depreciation of silver.

There is another consideration to be taken account of when we refer the fall in prices to the diminished production of gold. It is not correct to suppose that it is indispensable for the maintenance of prices that the quantity of the precious metals which form the standard shall be increased in proportion to the extension and volume of commerce. Numerous recent discoveries contribute to permit economy in the circulation of the precious metals. Submarine telegraphs, for example, more exact knowledge of the ocean-currents, the cutting of isthmuses, and improvements in the steam-engine are diminishing the use of these metals in international commerce. If we wish to send a million dollars in bullion from America to England, it will only take six or seven days now against the twelve or fifteen days that it took twenty years ago. Specie can be sent now from Australia to Great Britain in thirty-five days, where it took ninety days a quarter of a century ago. This shortening of the time required for the