property of France was valued at
$8,000,000,000, and in 1873 at about $40,000,000,000; in the former year
she had 29,000,000 people, and in the latter a little over 36,000,000. Her
per capita wealth, therefore, in 1803 was $276, and $1,081 in 1873, or
very nearly four times as much.

Thus, despite the immeasurable advantages which England enjoyed,
political, social, and industrial, her great colonial possessions from
which she drew enormous wealth, and her exemption from destructive war;
despite also the distressing condition of France and her recent enormous
losses, we find that in seventy years of bimetallism the working Frenchman
had gained wealth almost twice as fast as the working Englishman had in
the same number of years of monometallism.

France became a creditor nation, and yielded to the general pressure for a
single gold standard; she has lost heavily, as shown in her table of
exports, but she still retains a large part of the momentum acquired
during seventy years of bimetallism. Her wealth is still rated at
something over $40,000,000,000; her people have accumulated stocks of the
precious metals far in excess of those of any other country; and their
business is so solidly founded that the storm which recently shook the
foundations of credit throughout the British Empire scarcely produced a
quiver in France. They have wisely avoided the excessive issues of faith
money (or check money) which are the ever-present danger of England,
America, and other monometallic countries; and as a result, they have
almost entirely escaped those fearful convulsions have that threatened the
political stability of great nations. In fact, it is no exaggeration to
say that France has only felt the convulsions of recent years by their
reflex action on her from other countries; and twice within very recent
years has the Bank of England been compelled to go to France for the coin
to stay the devastating work of panics resulting from over-expansion of
faith money on an insufficient metallic basis.

France has an area less than that of Texas by some 60,000 square miles,
yet its aggregate wealth is two-thirds that of the United States; and on
the basis of assessed value her agricultural wealth is very much greater
than ours. Mulhall, the great British statistician, says of France that
she is "the best cultivated country in Europe." Her 6,000,000 peasant
proprietors are the owners of nearly all her cultivatable soil, which is
worth, o