R72 
POSTSCRIPT 
life. Cosmopolitanism has hitherto failed to suppress the 
national ‘will to live’; indeed, there has been a fresh develop- 
ment of patriotic sentiment in new lands, as well as in the 
old world, but it need not necessarily express itself in inter- 
national and inter-racial competition all ever the world. 
Patriotic traditions and aspirations may have full scope 
in nationalities, which are yet federated, for common political 
action and conscious economic co-operation, in one great 
Empire, 
The rapidity of change has also been stimulated by the 
success which has attended gold-mining during the last half- 
century. The discovery of gold in California in 1849 and 
the working of the Australian diggings in 1851 added 
immensely to the world’s stock of gold. This has been esti- 
mated as £560,000,000 in 1848, while it is believed that no 
less than £240,000,000 had been added before the close of 1860 
—or an increase of nearly fifty per cent’. The effects of the 
opening up of these sources of supply have been many and 
far-reaching. The most obvious has been a rapid fall in the 
value of gold, and, as a consequence, a rapid rise in prices in 
England, since gold is now the standard of value. We have 
very full records of the prices of commodities of all sorts for 
the period 1845—50, before the influence of the newly dis- 
covered gold was felt; and we see that in 1853 general prices 
ranged 11'3 per cent. higher, and that the increase went on 
till, in 1857, there had been a rise of no less than 288 per 
cent. on the prices for the quinquennial period which closed 
in 1850°" The changes in prices have been accompanied by 
variations in the relative value of the two precious metals; 
from 1850 till 1870 gold slightly depreciated relatively to 
silver; though this has been obscured in retrospect by the still 
greater changes of an opposite kind which occurred through 
apf Gite the opening up of the silver mines in Nevada, and the new 
value of the demands for gold which were set in motion by the alteration 
metals: Of the German monetary system in 1872, when gold was 
adopted in place of a standard that had been practically 
bi-metallic. The corresponding movements, in the sixteenth 
and seventeenth centuries, resulted in a difference of the rating 
of gold in different countries, all of which were chiefly silver- 
1 R. C. Jebb, Studies in Colonial Nationalism, 1. 
® Jevons, Investigations in Currency and Finance, 68- 
3 Jevons, Ib. 47. See Append. G.