4.-30 INFLUENCE OE RECENT GOLD DISCOVERIES ON PRICES. 



INFLUENCE OE EECENT GOLD DISCOVEKIES ON 



PEICES. 



BY E. A. MEREDITH, LL. B., ASSISTANT PROVINCIAL SECRETARY. 



Bead before the Canadian Institute, ldtJt April, 1856. 



The general rise in the prices of commodities in the old as well 

 as the new world, within the last four or five years, is one of the 

 most striking and important economic phenomena of the present 

 century. 



June, IS rS — the date of the first discovery of gold on the Sacramento 

 Elver in California — may be taken as the commencement of the era 

 of high prices. California and Australia, when they became the 

 centres of cheap gold for the world, became of necessitv, at the 

 same time, the centres of high prices. From these centres the tide of 

 gold has flowed over the civilized world in all directions, and wherever 

 it has flowed it has raised in a greater or less degree the level of 

 prices. 



Looking to the statistics of prices for the sixty years preceding 

 1848, we find that the former half of that period is marked by a high, 

 and the latter half, say from 1819 to 1848, by a low level of prices. 

 The causes, however, which kept up a high range of prices during the 

 thirty years preceding IS 19, will, I think, be found to differ in some 

 essential features, from those which, since 184S, have operated to pro- 

 duce a similar result. 



In the former period, the high prices (as Tooke has couch; 

 proved in his elaborate work on the History of Prices,) were due to 

 the combined effects of the great war in which Europe was then in- 

 volved and of a series of unfavourable seasons. "Whereas the general 

 advance of prices since 1848, although no doubt in some degree 

 intensified by the recent war and by other causes, is, as I hope to 

 shew, mainly due to the unparalleled influx of the precious metals from 

 California and Australia into Europe and the rest of the civilized 

 world, and to other causes more or less intimately connected with and 

 growing out of the gold discoveries in those countries. That these 

 discoveries are destined to bring about not only great economic and 

 commercial changes, but also materially to affect the social, political, 

 and moral condition of the world, cannot, I think, be questioned. As 

 to the general bearing of these various changes on the well-being 

 and happiness of mankind, thinking men indeed entertain widely 



