372 THE WONDERFUL CENTURY. 



ished and rendered less attractive. For it must never 

 be forgotten that the whole enormous amount of human 

 labor expended in the search for and the production of 

 gold; the ships which carry out the thousands of ex- 

 plorers, diggers, and speculators; the tools, implements, 

 and machinery they use; their houses, food, and cloth- 

 ing, as well as the countless gallons of liquor of various 

 qualities which they consume, are all, so far as the well- 

 being of the community is concerned, absolutely wasted. 

 Gold is not wealth ; it is neither a necessary nor a luxury 

 of life, in the true sense of the word. It serves two pur- 

 poses only: it is an instrument used for the exchange of 

 commodities, and its use in the arts is mainly <#s orna- 

 ment or as an indication of wealth. Nothing is more 

 certain than that the appearance of wealth produced by 

 large gold-production is delusive. The larger the pro- 

 portion of the population of a country that devotes 

 itself to gold-production, the smaller the numbers left to 

 produce real wealth food, clothing, houses, fuel, roads, 

 machinery, and all the innumerable conveniences, com- 

 forts, and wholesome luxuries of life. Hence, whatever 

 appearances may indicate, gold-production makes a coun- 

 try poor, and by furnishing new means of investment 

 and speculation helps to keep it poor; and it has cer- 

 tainly helped considerably in producing that amount of 

 wretchedness, starvation, and crime which, as we have 

 seen, has gone on increasing to the very end of our 

 century. 



But the extraction of the mineral products stored in 

 the earth, in order to increase individual wealth, and to 

 the same extent to the diminution of national well-being, 

 is only a portion of the injury done to posterity by the 



