VERIFICATION. INTRODUCTORY 159

quite different. The world’s supply, so far from being stationary,
has been enormously increased; and the constantly inflowing
product of the mines has gone first to the West. However much
the wealth of Ormuz and of Ind may shine in tradition, the East
has never been a considerable producer of the precious metals.
Certainly it has produced nothing of moment during the period
since the 16th century, when the trade with Europe began to
reach considerable volume, and when, too, our information begins
to be somewhat exact. The great increases in the supply of the
precious metals have taken place in quarters far from the Orient;
not only the famed American influx of 1550-1650, but the Australian
 and Californian flood of the mid-nineteenth century, and the
vast amount, first of silver then of gold, which poured in steadily
after 1870. Thruout, what happened between West and East
was not a process of distributive changes in an existing fixed stock,
but a parcelling out among different regions of a constantly augmenting
 supply. True, a considerable part of the continuing
product of the mines went to the East. But much the larger part
of that disappeared in the sink. What then constituted an addition
 to the circulating medium of the East was vastly less than what
was retained in the West and there functioned actively as money.
Of the total increase in the world’s monetary stock a much larger
part went into circulation in Western Europe than in Asia, the
disparity being the greater if reckoned not in terms of aggregate
quantities but in amounts per head of population.
These elements of the situation became more pronounced after
the middle of the 19th century. Then both the volume of the
trade in commodities and the volume of the specie flow reached
dimensions never before dreamed of, as indeed all economic
phenomena have become unexampled in magnitude. And with
the extraordinary increase in quantities, there came an accentuation
 of the particular international relations which we are now
considering. Money incomes and money standards in the Western
countries rose almost steadily — sometimes indeed with a standstill
 or a brief retrogression, but with upward movements after
every period of hesitancy, and in the end with great definitive