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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 51

15. England has no doubt prospered, but that prosperity is due, not to Free Trade, but to the gold discoveries in California and Australia

15. England has no doubt prospered, but that prosperity is due, not to Free Trade, but to the gold discoveries in California and Australia.

If, instead of California and Australia, the gold discoveries had been made in Yorkshire or Cornwall, one might more easily understand how England would have specially benefited by them; but that the decay of England should have been arrested by, and the huge fabric of her prosperity have been erected upon, the discovery, thirty years ago, of auriferous deposits in territories thousands of miles distant, is an assertion that bears on the face of it the stamp of absurdity. The effects of that increased production of gold have been much over-rated. They no doubt did enrich the people of America and Australia; just as the discovery of new copper mines or petroleum wells enrich the people who own them. But the profits on gold production are by no means excessive. The labour which it absorbs is abstracted from the production of wealth in another form, and the average net result is not considerable. No doubt, the consequent increase in the world's stock of gold tended to arrest the general fall of prices, and even in some degree to enhance them. It thus, for a short time, gave some stimulus to the trade of the world. But such effects, limited as they were in extent and transitory in duration, were common to all countries. England merely shared that influence with others, and derived from it no special or exceptional advantage. We should hardly have adduced for confutation so weak a plea as the above, but that some Protectionists (not many) have, from some peculiar turn of mind, considered that there was something in it. To sum up, the truth is that England Shared with the Rest of the World the Beneficial Influence, such as it was, of the Gold Discoveries in page 43 California and Australia, but Derived from them no Advantage Special to herself.