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surest test we can apply in judging of the comparative value of 
money at different periods. 
That the rate of wages in the gold-producing countries should he 
acted on directly by the conditions under which the material of 
money is produced is not to be wondered at. The manner in which 
it acts on wages in Europe is not so obvious, but is by no means in- 
capable of explanation. The price of labour is subject to the law of 
supply and demand, depending as it does on the numbers of the 
working population on the one hand, compared with the fund for 
the payment of wages on the other. If the gold discoveries, then, 
have caused unusual emigration, and so thinned the labour-market, 
while the equally unprecedented impetus given to trade, and attri- 
butable in part at least to these discoveries, has greatly increased 
the fund for the employment of labour, we discover a twofold cause 
for the rise which has taken place. 
The average annual emigration from the United Kingdom, which 
for the five years ending 1846 had been 87,850, increased for the 
five years ending 1855 to 299,300. 
The increase of the fund for the payment of wages may be judged 
of from the unparalleled extension of trade which has taken place 
since 1848. The real value of the exports of British produce, which 
in 1848 amounted to L. 52,849,445, rose in 1857 to L. 122, 066, 107, 
and, according to the Board of Trade tables recently issued, after 
falling in 1858 to L. 116, 608, 756, reached in 1859 the absolutely 
unprecedented sum of L. 130,440,427. No doubt much of this in- 
crease must be set down to the credit of our recent free-trade legis- 
lation ; but a considerable proportion of the increase, especially since 
1851, consists of additions to our trade with the gold-producing 
countries. Our exports to Australia, for example, which in 1848 
amounted to less than one million and a half, had increased in 1859 
to eleven millions and a quarter. 
The coinage of gold in Great Britain, France, and the United 
States, has kept pace with the increased supplies of that metal. In 
this country, between 1848 and the end of 1856, we had coined 
gold to the value of fifty millions. In the United States, during 
the same period, the gold coinage amounted to the value of 682 - 
millions sterling; while in France, between 1850 and the end of 
1858, it amounted to a sum equal to L. 129, 587, 735 sterling. The 
importance of these figures will be appreciated when it is remembered 
