s,
will often have cause to say, 'Are we ruined this morning?' To which the
answer will not unfrequently be, 'Yes; but this is the best place for
being ruined that has yet been discovered. You have trusted to the
guidance of a _will-of-the-wisp_; but a _will-of-the-wisp_ has been
known to lead a man by accident to a better path than that which he had
lost.' There is no use, therefore, in wasting our pity upon those who
may happen to suffer by the first of the two delusions which I noticed,
viz., the conceit that either Australia or California offers a lottery
without blanks. Blanks too probably they will draw; but what matters it,
when this disappointment cannot reach them until they find themselves
amidst a wilderness of supplementary hopes? One prize has been lost, but
twenty others have been laid open that had never been anticipated.

Far different, on the other hand, is the second delusion--the delusion
of those who mistake a transitional for a permanent prosperity, and many
of whom go so far in their frenzy as to see only matter of
congratulation in the very extremity of changes, which (if realized)
would carry desperate ruin into our social economy. For these people
there is no indemnification. I begin with this proposition--that no
material extension can be given to the use of gold after great national
wants are provided for, without an enormous lowering of its price: which
lowering, if once effected, and exactly in proportion as it is effected,
takes away from the gold-diggers all motive for producing it. The
dilemma is this, and seems to me inevitable: Given a certain
depreciation of gold, as, for instance, by 80 per cent., then the
profits of the miners falling in that same proportion[44] (viz., by
four-fifths) will leave no temptation whatever to pursue the trade of
digging. But, on the other hand, such a depreciation _not_ being
given--gold being supposed to range at anything approaching to its old
price--in that case no considerable extension as to the uses of gold is
possible. In either case alike the motive for producing gold rapidly
decays. To keep up any steady encouragement to the miners, the market
for gold must be prodigiously extended. That the market may be extended,
new applications of gold must be devised: the old applications would not
absorb more than a very limited increase. That new applications may be
devised, a prodigious lowering of the price is required. But precisely
as that result is ap