ANALOGY WITH THE ELIZABETHAN AGE 873 
nsing; in recent years it has brought about a marked 
cleavage between the gold-using and the silver-using coun- 
tries. The financial and commercial relations between England 
and India have been altered ; Indian production, both of raw 
products and textiles, has been stimulated by the high silver 
prices which could be obtained in gold-using countries, and 
in England the agricultural interest appears to have been 
depressed by the importation of grain ripened in a silver- 
using country?, while English manufactures cannot be so 
profitably exported to the silver areas. The remarkable 
development of trade, from 1850 to 1874, appears to be 
directly connected with the rise of prices which followed the 
discoveries of gold®, while the subsequent depression is equally 
clearly connected with the dislocation which has been due 
to the fall in the value of silver relatively to golds. The 
material prosperity of England is dependent on trade, and 
the main influences which have affected her industrial and 
agricultural life during the last half-century have originated 
in events which occurred in distant parts of the world. 
The parallel, between the period which followed the Cw TO 
discovery of the New World and the last half-century, holds for the 
good, not only in regard to prices, but in other ways as well. Ltn 
There has been an unprecedented opportunity for the forma- 
tion of capital; and the new means of communication which 
have been opened up, have made it possible for enterprising 
men to invest it, in developing the resources and industry of 
any part of the globe. In the sixteenth century England 
was a backward country, and capitalists seeking for invest- 
ments looked towards it from all the continental monetary 
centres. During the last half-century London has been the 
city in which financial business has been chiefly concentrated, 
and English capital has flowed out to engage in industrial 
and commercial and engineering undertakings in our colonies, 
in foreign countries, and in uncivilised lands. 
There is another aspect in which the parallel holds good; 
the addition which accrued to the world’s bullion—stimulating 
L Report of Gold and Silver Commission, in Reports, 1888, Lv, 331. 
} Bowley, England's Foreign Trade, 98. 
} Nicholson, Money and Monetary Problems, 180. 
Ll. Price, Money and its Relation to Prices, 181.