EFFECTS OF THE NEW GOLD AND SILVER. 781 



hindrances which the English Government attempted to put 

 on the exportation of the precious metals were in the least 

 degree effectual as regards European trade. No doubt they 

 were as regards the trade of the East India Company, with 

 which the permission to export bullion was vital to the success 

 of the traffic. But as for currency movements between, for 

 example, Amsterdam and London, it is more than probable 

 that all the Acts of Parliament and all the police of the ports 

 were entirely ineffectual and futile. These regulations had 

 probably only one effect ; they appeared to create a difficulty 

 in the punctual payment of bills of exchange, especially in a 

 time when persons were familiar with prodigious fluctuations 

 in the foreign exchanges, fluctuations which modern experts 

 in monetary science find it difficult to understand, or even 

 believe, such for example as I have shown to have occurred 

 in the eight years 1695-1 702 l . But in a time when extra- 

 ordinary profits were to be made, men were not very much 

 alarmed at paying a price for advances which no sound trader 

 would pay now, and no sensible money-dealer would listen to 

 without well-grounded suspicion. 



The circulation of the precious metals then, and their acquisi- 

 tion, as the circumstances of the case required, were not therefore 

 I believe affected by the ingenious expedients by which the 

 English, and indeed other Governments, attempted to secure 

 what has been called the balance of trade and the balance 

 on bargain, though, consciously or unconsciously, these stupid 

 and evident absurdities are even now current. What the 

 English people did in the seventeenth century is what the 

 English people are doing in the nineteenth, striving with vary- 

 ing success to secure and maintain a balance of production over 

 expenditure. The machinery of trade enables a country in 

 which this practice is habitual to draw at its pleasure upon 

 metallic products, or metallic reserves ; and when a country 

 like Great Britain is an extensive creditor of other countries, 

 this power is in the fullest efficiency. 



1 The First Nine Yean of the Bank of England, p. 165. 



