PAPER MONEY. CHAP. XXX. 



fluctuations may have been. Thus our bank and 

 other bills in 1810 would buy a little more 

 than ten million ounces of gold when they 

 amounted to forty-eight millions nominally ; they 

 would purchase nearly the same weight in 1814, 

 when they had reached sixty millions; and almost 

 as much when, in 1829, they had sunk to forty 

 millions ; and the same effect may be traced in the 

 other countries where paper money was issued. 



The paper money which thus acted the part of 

 an auxiliary to the metallic money amounted in 

 metallic value to about one hundred and twenty 

 millions during the whole period ; but the whole 

 of it cannot be viewed as coming in aid of the 

 coined money. A reserve of coin must have been 

 retained in deposit as a resource to meet unforeseen 

 demands, or as a preparation for that which was 

 looked forward to, with different degrees of inten- 

 sity at different periods, namely, a return to cash 

 payments. It may perhaps be allowable to assume 

 that coin of the value of one-third of the paper 

 money was withheld from circulation, and that 

 only two-thirds or eighty millions of paper money 

 were available to the currency for the general pur- 

 pose of the interchange of commodities. We should 

 thus have had a circulating medium in 1810 of four 

 hundred and sixty millions, and in 1830 of four 

 hundred millions. 



If the prices of commodities were regulated 

 solely by the quantity of the circulating medium, 



