1^8 Mr. Faraday on 



On some Remarks by the Right Honourable William 

 Ewart Gladstone, M.P., on the relative stability 

 of Gold and Silver as Standards of Value ; being a 

 vindication of the opinions of Ricardo and Cobden. 

 By F. J. Faraday, F.LS., F.S.S. 



{Received March yth, i8gj) 



It is well known that a former esteemed member of the 

 Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, the late 

 Professor W. Stanley Jevons, wrote much on the value of 

 gold, his special interest in the subject being a consequence, 

 probably, of his employment in very early life, before his 

 association with the Owens College, as assayer to the 

 Sydney Mint. In 1863 he published the results of an 

 exhaustive investigation under the title, " A Serious Fall in 

 the Value of Gold ascertained, and its Social Effects set 

 forth." In this paper, Mr. Jevons arrived at the conclusion 

 that, owing to the Californian and Australian gold dis- 

 coveries, gold was depreciated 29% in 1857, and that at the 

 period at which he was writing, the average depreciation had 

 been about 9 % ; and he predicted that, within the next six 

 years, there would be an average depreciation of from 40 to 

 50% . As Professor Foxwell has pointed out, Mr. Jevons, in 

 arriving at this latter conclusion, overlooked the stimulating 

 influence of advancing prices on scientific discovery, 

 mechanical invention, productive industry, and trade. In a 

 paper published in 1869, the year before the considerable 

 disturbance caused by the series of events of which the 

 Franco-German War was the first, he demonstrated that 

 gold was depreciated 16 to 18%. Now, in his speech 

 in the House of Commons on February 28, 1893, on 

 Sir Henry Meysey Thompson's motion respecting the 



