The recognition of gold and silver from the earliest times as a convenient means of purchase, their ultimate adoption as a prevailing standard of value, their coinage by all the richer states into pieces of money, in virtue of which their circulation and absorption have been immensely increased, and the extent to which they have become the necessary financial reserve of Governments, banks, trading companies, and merchants, have given to these metals a greatly more extended use and importance than they could have acquired in the ordinary process of arts and manufactures; though even in this latter sphere, as gold and silver become more abundant and communities richer, the purposes to which they are applied and the demand for them are susceptible of much expansion. Writers of high authority have attempted at various periods to estimate the production of gold and silver, and correlatively their use and consumpt in the monetary system and the arts; but there is scarcely any subject of statistical inquiry on which it is so difficult to arrive at more than conjectural results. Yet in view of the theoretical speculations that arose on the Californian and Australian gold discoveries, the produce of these new fields of supply may here be worthy of notice. The Californian mines were computed to have in three years yielded gold to the value of £35,000,000 sterling. The Australian mines, still more prolific, were estimated in three years from their opening to be equal to an annual produce of £20,000,000 sterling. Such results, sustained over a considerable period of years, presented a phenomenon similar to the more slowly developed effects of the discovery of the South American mines in the 16th century; and it must be admitted that California and Australia, after many reverses in their mining industry, remain the most gold-productive countries in the world. But their produce of bullion has of late years much fallen in amount.

The director of the United States’ Mint, in his report for 1875, estimates the annual yield of gold and silver in California and other United States possessions at $100,000,000, or about £20,000,000. The total export of bullion and specie from Australia, after deducting the import (chiefly intercolonial), varied in the fifteen years 1858-1872 from 11⅜ to 7⅜ millions sterling per annum the general tendency being towards the lower amounts in the later years (Statistical Abstract for Colonial and other Possessions of United Kingdom, 1874). The annual average export in these fifteen years was £9,747,635, and must be held to measure amply the produce of the gold and silver mines of Australia. The annual production of bullion in the United States and Australia cannot, on these data, be estimated at more than 28 millions sterling. Humboldt found the annual produce of the gold and silver mines of America, Europe, and Northern Asia, at the beginning of the century, to be about £9,700,000. The yield of gold and silver from the same sources in 1850-57 was estimated by M i Culloch, in the Commercial Dictionary, to be £14,000,000. The old gold and silver mines can hardly have become more productive since the advent of the Californian and Australian diggings, so that it would appear the latter have increased the visible annual supply of gold and silver about threefold, or from £14,000,000 to £42,000,000. Japan, so far as can be judged from the exchanges, must now be added to the list of gold-producing countries. For several years in succession Japan has exported considerable and apparently increasing amounts of treasure, or gold and silver coins of its own mint. In 1874 this export amounted to $13,332,794, or nearly three millions sterling (Sir Henry Parkes’s Summary of Consular Reports'). During the first six months of 1875 the imports of bullion from Yokohama to London were £1,257,170 gold, £95,080 silver; and not improbably the next great access of the product of goldmines may be from that part of the world. But notwithstanding this marked increase of gold and silver since 1850, when one considers the increase of population, the still greater increase of trade and industry, and the vast extension of financial and commercial affairs in the same period, it may be held doubtful whether gold and silver have lost any of their old proportion to the need for them and to the work they have to do.

When the coffers of the great banks of Europe were filled with the virgin gold of California and Australia, one of the first consequences was a desire on the part of countries in which silver was either a collateral standard of value with gold, or the sole standard of value, to discard the silver standard and adopt gold as the sole standard, involving in either case a large displacement of silver coinage and reserve, and a large infusion in its room of gold coinage and reserve. This result was exhibited in the mint operations both of France and England. In the former country silver retains its quality of legal tender in a modified degree; but the proportion of silver authorized by the Bank Charter Act of 1844 has long disappeared from the bullion reserve of the Bank of England, which now consists wholly of gold. It was one of the first resolutions of the German Empire, on the conclusion of the war of 1870-71, not only to make gold the sole standard, but to dislodge all the old silver money of the German States; and in the same connection it may be observed, that the director of the United States’ Mint, in reporting £20,000,000 as the annual produce of the United States’ mines, uses this fact as an argument for the immediate resumption of specie payment—or, in other words, that the American people, by a strenuous effort, should strive to keep as much of the bullion-product of their mines at home as may enable the whole currency of the Union* to become either gold and silver, or of convertible gold value. This preference for the more precious metal as the sole standard of value, and for gold and silver coin as a medium of general circulation, may be expected to extend throughout the world in proportion as the produce of the mines may be increased; and in this respect alone there is a vast opening for the beneficial use both of gold and silver. It gives some idea of the immense service of bullion in the international exchanges, as well a3 in the replenishment of the internal metallic circulations, to observe that in the thirteen years 1858-70 the annual average registered import of gold and silver (real value) to the United Kingdom was £27,083,330, the average annual export £22,095,346; and that in the same thirteen years the average annual coinage of gold and silver in the Royal Mint was £4,854,661, or nearly equal to the annual excess of imports over exports of bullion, which flows in all this volume through London to and from every part of the globe— (Statistical Abstract for United Kingdom, 1872).

While the production of gold has declined of late years from the maximum attained after the Californian and Australian discoveries, the production of silver has begun to increase, and in the rapid development of minerals containing this metal, is generally expected to increase in the future. But it would seem premature from the facts of past experience to anticipate any permanent depreciation of the value of silver in relation to gold. The price of silver in the market of London from 1833 to 1873 ranged from 59d. to 62∣d. per oz., and during that time fully maintained its standard value in par with that of gold— (Table of Messrs Pixley and Abell, bullion-brokers, London). But in the subsequent years a decline in the price of silver has occurred, and it fell in 1875 to 56d. per ounce. This may be the result of temporary causes, such as (1) the fact of £20,000,000 of German silver, displaced by the new gold coinage hanging over the market; and (2) a cessation of demand for India and China, which the exchanges of the East with Europe may at any time alter.