On a review of the whole period two simple facts emerge with unmistakable plainness and import.
- It was a period in which the commercial expanse outstripped the reinforcing supply of the precious metals, and therefore in which a real decline of prices7 prevails.
- The evil effects of such decline were enormously increased by shortsighted, crafty manipulation of the currency by the European rulers, and by the rough, unscientific system of the prevailing coinage and exchange rates, and by the inability of the age to Page 60 understand, or even to perceive, the hidden working of two metals see-sawing against each other—acting as levers against each other—cutting each other's throats. The discovery of America corrected the fall of prices and saved Europe, but it left her rulers as deadly ignorant as before of the workings of bimetallism—to give a name to what they had not even perceived as a phenomenon, much less as a system.
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