mint ratio of 1 to 15.988, while the market ratio in 1834 was 1 to 15.73. Here, [pg 320] again, appeared the difficulty arising from the attempt to balance a ratio on a movable fulcrum. It will be seen that the act of 1834 set at work forces for another change in the coinage—forces of a similar kind, but working in exactly the opposite direction to those previous to 1834. A dollar of gold coin would now exchange for more grains of silver at the mint (15.98) than it would in the form of bullion in the market (15.73). Therefore it would be more profitable to put gold into coin than exchange it as bullion. Gold was sent to the mint, while silver began to be withdrawn from circulation, silver now being more valuable as bullion than as coin. By 1840 a silver dollar was worth 102 cents in gold.238 This movement, which was displacing silver with gold, received a surprising and unexpected impetus by the gold discoveries of California and Australia in 1849, before mentioned, and made gold less valuable relatively to silver, by lowering the value of gold. Here, again, was another natural cause, independent of legislation, and not to be foreseen, altering the value of one of the precious metals, and in exactly the opposite direction from that in the previous period, when silver was lowered by the increase from the Mexican mines. In 1853 a silver dollar was worth 104 cents in gold (i.e., of a gold dollar containing 23.22 grains); but, some years before, all silver dollars had disappeared from use, and only gold was in circulation. For a large part of this period we had in reality a single standard of gold, the other metal not being able to stay in the currency.
III. After our previous experience, the impossibility of retaining both metals in the coinage together, on equal terms, now came to be generally recognized, and was accepted by Congress in the legislation of 1853.