nd thus did she save the world from a great
calamity.

Scarcely, however, had the golden flood begun when the moneyed classes and
those with fixed incomes raised a loud cry. From the laboring producers no
complaint was heard. They never complain of increased coinage. In the
United States we knew nothing of this clamor, for we then had no large
creditor class, no great amount of bonds, and very few people interested
more in the value of money than in the rewards of labor. In Europe,
however, all the leading writers on finance and industries took part. In
1852 M. Leon Faucher wrote: "Every one was frightened ten years ago at the
prospect of the depreciation of silver; during the last eighteen months it
is the diminution in the price of gold that has been alarming the public."
In England, the philosopher DeQuincey wrote that California and Australia
might be relied upon to furnish the world $350,000,000 in gold per year
for many years, thus rendering the metal practically worthless for
monetary purposes, and another Englishman, as if resolved to go one
better, declared that gold would soon be fit only for the dust pan. M.
Chevalier took up the task of convincing the nations that gold should be
demonetized as too cheap for a currency, and of course the interested
classes soon organized for action.

Holland had already begun the process in 1847, but had managed it so
awkwardly that her condition is not easily understood or described as it
was in 1857. The estimated amount to be thrown out of use was only half
the real amount, and in the attempt to avoid a small evil they produced a
very great one.

Austria was at that time involved in trouble with her paper money system,
and thought the cheapening of gold offered a fair opportunity to come to a
metallic basis. The reasoning of her statesmen was singularly like that of
General Grant in 1874, when he pointed to the great silver discoveries in
Nevada as a providential aid to the restoration of specie payments, being
at the time in sublime ignorance that he had long before signed an act
demonetizing silver, and thereby depriving this country of the benefit of
such providential aid. But the strength of the creditor classes was
entirely too much for Austria and Prussia, and the German States allied
with them almost unanimously declared for throwing gold out of
circulation. A convention had been held at Dresden in 1838, with the view
to unifying the coinage, but little had been a