at higher than ordinary interest.* In the future distribution of the precious metals, in like manner, over markets in which prices will rise-thereby investing with considerable pecuniary value resources which now have scarce any pecuniary value at all-we may reasonably foresee a source of high profit and interest for a long time to come. The very spirit of mingled economy and enterprise, which adds to the quantity of capital in the loan market, by attracting hitherto unemployed funds from the hoard, the till, and the private account at the bank, tends to provide more profitable employment for the capital seeking investment. "It is," in Mr. Patterson's words, "the utilisation of hitherto useless things which peculiarly characterizes our times. It is the utilisation of neglected resources, the accumulation and concentrated appliance of a thousand forces of saving, which is the basis of our extending power. We are economizing our money like everything else; and this economy of capital, almost as much as the new gold mines, is the agency which is giving to commerce its enormous expansion." In the production of gold in mines utterly valueless less than a generation ago and now worth twenty millions a year-in the reclamation of waste lands and waste substances at home and abroad-in trade with new markets and industrial enterprise in new regions -in the collection and subsequent diffusion of formerly unemployed money, the same principle is operative throughout; a principle on which we may rely to find profitable use for the fresh produce of the mines, and for the savings of our incomes for an indefinite period. In a pamphlet lately published on Banks and Bank Management, Mr. Stirling attributes the high rate of interest in 1863 and 1864 to an extraordinary demand in each of those years for capital, to the amount of 400 millions, the items of which he makes up as follows:-"Increased cost of cotton, 40 millions; demand of limited liabilities, 110 millions; increased ordinary expenditure of the Governments of England and France, 50 millions; European loans, 50 millions; American war expenditure, 150 millions; total annual exceptional demand, 400 millions." The first three of these items seem to us to be greatly exaggerated. No such sum was really withdrawn for cotton in the first instance, a great portion having been paid for roundabout by exports of our own manufactures at higher prices, both our exports and imports having latterly been set down at higher figures in money. Again, the Economist estimates the sums actually raised by the new companies in the two last years together, at a less amount than 40 millions. And the increase in the ordinary expenditure of the Governments of England and France has not, we are convinced, been as great as the increase of the aggregate incomes and tax-paying ability of the two nations, and has therefore not trespassed upon capital. The American war and the European loans have no doubt made a considerable additional demand on the loan market. The same economical movement has brought petroleum*-to take one of the latest examples of the redemption of wealth from the regions of waste-and the new gold into the market, and the former is à new demand for the latter. In every neglected or undervalued resource in the natural world or in human capacity, there is a profitable investment for money, and commercial enterprise is constantly finding fresh employment for money, both in the purchase of new articles of value, and in higher prices for things of which the value is enhanced by improvement. Speaking of the non-valeurs (a term for which we have no exact English equivalent) which still abound even in the most civilized countries, M. About remarks that among them should be classed not only things absolutely wasted and worthless from neglect, but also things whose value is only partially realized, like land under corn which would fetch more under grass. Such things M. About designates as non-valeurs relatives, including among them all the insufficiently exercised powers of humanity. An entire half of the French nation, he adds-the whole female sex-belongs to the category of non-valeurs relatives. But if women were enabled, by both custom and law, to realize the full worth of their powers, the higher prices their industry would obtain would denote, not a fall in the value of money, but a rise in the value of women. So the increase in the money earnings of coolies and ryots in India, and fellahs in Egypt, denotes not a mere doubling or trebling of counters of payment, but an elevation of the commercial status of two nations. There is thus an important distinction between the significance of a rise of prices at Calcutta and in London; in the latter it signifies generally either a scarcity of commodities or a depreciation of money, but in the former it signifies trade on better terms with the world, as well as a change in the local value of money. lowered the value of money in England is The question whether the new mines have one the more difficult to answer with precision, since, in addition to the absence of perfect statistics, causes, such as bad seasons and the Russian and American wars, have temporarily affected the prices of great classes of goods. Setting aside these disturbances, the truth seems to be, that while, on the one hand, such important commodities as corn, "Though petroleum has been but four years an article of commerce, it has already assumed the second place among the exports of the United States, and now ranks next to breadstuffs. In 1860 scarcely any was exported; last year the exports amounted to 32,000,000 gallons, while the domestie consumption was even greater.”—Times, April 27, 1865. Mr. sugar, and coal* are cheaper than formerly, | cially designed to provide, at a comparatively and the wholesale prices of textile manufac- small cost, the additional money required by tures, although higher than during the de- the increased trade of India, and its Governpression of trade for some years before 1851, ment to have resolved to defeat the economy remained nearly stationary from that year of nature. In contending, however, for all until the American war, on the other hand, possible economy in the monetary system of the prices of animal food, of land, and of India and every other country, we cannot metal manufactures have considerably risen; adopt the opinion Mr. Patterson appears to and the result would appear to be, that in entertain, that the economy might be carried wholesale trade the general value of money so far as to dispense with the cost of metallic was not sensibly altered in England before currencies altogether. Coin is better fitted the American war. But, speaking of retail for rough work and for the labourer's pocket prices, into which higher rents, wages, and than bank-notes. It cannot, like paper, be prices of animal food more or less enter, we eaten by ants in the East, and is safer from should say that the cost of subsistence is de- water and fire. Nor can we conceive that a cidedly greater to all classes, except agricul- currency would be safe from depreciation by tural labourers, whose chief expenditure is excess, unless based upon things possessing on bread, sugar, and tea; and that fixed in- intrinsic value like silver and gold. comes by no means buy as much as they Patterson argues that the value of money used, especially in remote parts of the coun- depends simply on its conventional use and try. We believe, too, with an eminent acceptance. But limitation of supply is in economist, that the real rise of prices to con- all cases an indispensable condition of value; sumers is partially disguised in a deteriorated and the history of assignats in France, and quality of many things. The disguises which greenbacks in America, shows that negotiathe fact that people are really given less for bility does not constitute the determining their money may assume, are numberless. element of the value of a currency.* For example, the prices were the same at taking this view of the monetary use and the bathing establishments of Biarritz last importance of the precious metals, it seems autumn as in former years, but the visitor to be a question worth considering, whether could often get nothing but a wet and dirty the future supplies are likely to be sufficient bathing-dress for his sous. French gloves, to supply money enough for the rapid proagain, are not only dearer than formerly, but gress of the backward parts of the world, seem made in order to tear; and both in and the immense developments their reEngland and France, washerwomen are apt sources seem sure to obtain. Mr. Maine has to spoil linen now for the prices at which remarked that investigators of the differences they used formerly to dress it. between stationary and progressive societies. must, at the outset, realize clearly the fact But the effects of the new mines upon prices are far less obscurely and far more satisfactorily discernible in countries like India, where they have directly or indirectly furnished the means of raising the remuneration of industry, and circulating produce which had formerly little or no circulation. The result of this influx of money into India is by no means merely the trouble of carrying and counting more coins to do the same business as formerly; and so far as there has been such a result, it might have been in a great measure avoided had the Government allowed gold to pass current as money. By the exclusion of gold, India has been obliged to fetch a much bulkier material for its rency from a far greater distance, and to incur an unnecessary loss, first, on the freight from abroad; next, on the coinage at the mint; thirdly, on the carriage through the country; and fourthly, on the wear and tear of so many more new coins. The great mines of Australia seem to have been spe And *Mr. Bonamy Price says in a recent article : "The peculiarity of this commodity (gold) consists only in this, that every man agrees to take it in exchange for his goods. The general consent to make gold the medium of exchange constitutes the precise demand for gold, just as the general consent to make shoes of leather constitutes the demand for leather." But the social compact to wear shoes does not determine what they are worth; that depends on the supply of leather and competent shoemakers. The public consents to take shillings as well as sovereigns, but it is not their consent that makes a sovereign worth twenty shillings, which it would not be if gold were as easy to get as silver. So the public may consent to take pieces of paper for coins, but how many cur-pends on the comparative scarcity of each. We must be given for a horse or a cow or a loaf demake this comment merely to illustrate the principle that the value of money depends on its rarity, and not on convention and custom, for we confess we do not see the drift of Mr. Price's arguments. He refutes some fallacies of the old mercantile school which hardly required fresh refutation, and which are not supported by any of the writers on currency he refers to. But he by no means makes it clear whether he objects only to the particular Average shipping price of Newcastle coal- provisions of the Bank Charter Act, or to a metal1841, 10s. 6d. per ton; 1850, 9s. 6d.; 1860, 98.lic standard altogether, and to Sir Robert Peel's The Coal Question, by W. S. Jevons, Esq., page 61. definition of a pound. that the stationary condition of the human | years to come; and that when to this is race is the rule, the progressive the excep- added the produce of the rich mines of Netion; and when this reflection was made, the vada, Idaho, Arizona, and Oregon, there can condition of the greater part of Asia and of be no doubt that the total increase will be Northern Africa might even have justified very great. This anticipation seems conthe proposition that a retrograde condition firmed by the fact that the exports of treaof the human race was the rule. In the sure from San Francisco in the fiscal year wildest regions frequented by the nomad ending in June, 1864, amounted to the value hordes of Central Asia, the traveller dis- of 51,264,023 dols.; the larger proportion covers the vestiges of former cultivation being in the latter half of the period, and and wealth. But he can now perceive in the entire sum being considerably greater such regions that while he stands on the than in any other year since 1856. From grave of an old civilisation he stands also on Mexico and South America great additional the borders of a new one. It seems certain, supplies may also be expected. Of Peru the at least as regards Asia, which contains the British Consul says-" Peru is one vast mine bulk of the human race, that not only the which the hand of man has only hitherto stationary, but the retrograde communities scratched." To the produce of the mines will become progressive-will be reached by must further be added the vast sums that roads, railways, river navigation, and West- the progress of commerce will restore to cirern commerce, and obtain the aid of Western culation from the hoards of Asia and Europe, capital and skill. And it seems equally cer- which, even in such places as Lapland, are tain that the pecuniary value of their pro- great. Large sums of Norwegian money are duce will immensely increase; and they will said by Mr. Laing, in his Journal of a Resineed vast quantities of coin for its circula- dence in Norway, to have disappeared in tion; and that the question is one of im- Lapland; the wealthiest Laplanders having portance, whether coin enough for the pur- always been accustomed to live, like the pose will be easily obtained. The steady poorest, on the produce of their reindeer, decline in the produce of the gold-fields of and to bury the money coming to them from Victoria, from 2,761,528 ounces in 1857 to Norway in places where their heirs often fail 1,557,397 ounces in 1864, might seem at to discover it. first to justify a doubt on the subject; and the existence of a great gold region near the sources of the Nile, on which some writers have reckoned, is in Sir Roderick Murchison's opinion contravened by the evidence of Captain Speke respecting the geological structure of the country. But the decline in the production of gold in Victoria has arisen rather from the migration of miners to New South Wales and New Zealand than from a diminishing fertility of the mines. In fact, the gold-fields of Victoria yielded more in proportion to the number of labourers in 1864 than in either of the previous years; 97,942 miners obtaining 1,702,460 oz. in 1862; 92,292 obtaining 1,578,079 oz. in 1863; and 83,394 obtaining 1,557,397 oz. in 1864. And in 1857, when the gold yield of Victoria reached its maximum, that of New South Wales only amounted to the value of £674,470; whereas it has been more than three times as much on the average for the last three years.* From the Western States of North America, again, the supply of the precious metals seems likely to increase. In a recent report, the British Consul at San Francisco states it as his belief that even in California the production of the precious metals will increase for many *In some of the districts of the Australian mines the yield has lately fallen off, but solely by reason of the scarcity of water, not of gold. The movement we have discussed is one which tends to bring all buried and neglected riches to light; and we anticipate from it both an ample provision of money and an increasing demand for it. ART. III.-1. Memoirs, Miscellanies, and 3. Selections from the Letters of Caroline Frances Cornwallis. London: Trübner aud Co., 1864. IT cannot be doubted that a marked difference in the relations of the female sex to the literary culture of the day, as compared with the state of things two generations back, is one result of the intellectual march of the present century. Female authorship is far more common than it was, is far more enterprising than it was; it is more business-like, and has less of the flutter of self-consciousness; while, by a natural consequence, it attracts far less of special notice and compliment than it formerly did. For we must not overstate the case as regards the discouragement which the 1 woman of letters is generally supposed to have received from the ruling sex. Ladies who belonged to a favoured clique were sure, in olden times as well as now, of credit and renown. Poor Mrs. Elstob, one of the first Saxon scholars of her day, could indeed pine in drudgery and obscurity, but Mrs. Montagu, Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, Fanny Burney, with a select circle of attendant nymphs great in the minor morals, were praised up to and beyond their deserts; and though "F. B." confined herself to novel-writing, a department in which women have always been allowed certain chartered rights, and Mrs. Chapone and Miss Talbot were strictly feminine in their aspirations, yet the authoress of the Essay on Shak-1 speare, and the translator of Epictetus, boldly trenched on ground which, in those days at all events, masculine intellects considered exclusively their own. When angry, it is true, Johnson could speak hard words of Mrs. Montagu's Latin and Greek; but the wonderful feat of translating Epictetus seems to have placed Mrs. Carter on a pedestal which even the surly dictator did not grudge her, though possibly her discreet backwardness in exposing her acquirements to the ordeal of conversation may have had something to do with his indulgence. "My old friend Mrs. Carter," he said, "could make a pudding as well as translate Epictetus from the Greek, and work a handkerchief as well as compose a poem." "He thought, however," adds Boswell, "that she was too reserved in conversation upon subjects she was so eminently able to converse upon, which was occasioned by her modesty and fear of giving offence." No doubt, in the middle of the eighteenth century, the women of the upper classes were, taken as a whole, more rational and capable beings than they had been in the days of the Spectator. In one of the conversations recorded by Fanny Burney, we find Dr. Johnson expressing in strong terms his sense of the advance made within his own recollection. "He told them he well remembered when a woman who could spell a common letter was regarded as all-accomplished; but now they vied with the men in everything."* Still we cannot turn over the familiar correspondence of the miniature Sapphos and Hypatias of Johnson's time, without discerning how strongly the consciousness of special merit worked within them. We see it in the ostentatious modesty which is sometimes more significant than braggart boasting; we see it in the little pedantries of style and allusion with which they trick out the merest commonplace of sentiment. For real scholarlike appreciation of the subjects they deal with, we should look in vain in the lucubrations of the most renowned female students of that day :-poor Mrs. Elstob, already referred to, whose Anglo-Saxon researches really were worth something, never attained worldly repute. The conclusions they draw from their own investigations into the wellsprings of knowledge are mostly moralizings of a general cast, trite and jejune we should now say; but then it is fair to remember that there was a very strong and prevailing bent among all thinkers, shallow and deep, towards moral and metaphysical didactics in that age, and the "Rambler" himself could utter pompous platitudes sometimes. But to revert to our argument. Allowing that a change had taken place in the intellectual position of the weaker sex, between the era of Addison and that of Johnson, there has assuredly been a change also no less distinetly perceptible in its position between Johnson's days and our own, and one that has been proceeding at a vastly accelerated pace within the last five-and-thirty years. The date of the Reform Bill, though it seems but as yesterday to many still in the full vigour of life, carries us back to an antiquated world in many respects; in this among others. The literary atmosphere was still reverberating with the echoes of the poetry and romance which had glorified the long years of European strife and agitation. But Byron was in his recent grave; Scott was wielding with a paralysed hand the pen that had fascinated the heads and hearts of his generation; Southey had written the last of his epics, and people had almost ceased to read them. Wordsworth was the poet of the day; but his admirers were comparatively few and select. His muse was placid and meditative; the shout of the Forum was to be raised in honour of other deities than those of Parnassus. Science, education for the masses, political enfranchisement, became the prevailing topics in men's mouths. Sentiment yielded to utility, the illusions of chivalry to hard material progress. A certain scarcely disguised superciliousness in the tone hitherto assumed towards science by men who had been brought up in the poetical and historical cultivation of the Georgian era, now gave way to a much more respectful appreciation of her claims. The old prejudices against the 'ologies rapidly disappeared. The classification of plants and stones, hitherto in the polite world looked upon as little more than an elegant diversion for idle hours, assumed a more serious significance as means towards unlocking creation's mysteries. The history of the earth's formation was becoming a subject to be feared, indeed, in the eyes of many, but no longer to be despised. It was from about this same epoch, as we | take it, that the term "blue-stocking," first applied in the Johnsonian society to ladies of literary pretension or acquirement, began to grow obsolete. In the intensified zest and value for practical and scientific knowledge which now set in, the world came to forget its prejudices of sex as well as of caste, and to prize any contribution to the current stock of information for what it was worth. This, at least, was the tendency of things; but, as always happens, the force of new principles began to be felt long before they effectually leavened the general mass of opinion; and it was not for many a year after the Society for the "Diffusion of Useful Knowledge," and the "Library of Entertaining" ditto, and Penny Magazines, and Mrs. Marcet's Popular Conversations on Science, and Miss Martineau's Tales illustrative of the Principles of Political Economy, had instructed the minds of the new generation, that the authoress who ventured on any ground save that of fiction or mild ethical rede, ceased to be regarded by a considerable portion of society as something of an unfeminine intruder, a blue," and a pretender, probably superficial and certainly presumptuous. backwards; most reluctant to display, yet proudly conscious of possessing, capacities of insight and of reasoning far beyond the limits usually assigned to her sex. Miss Aikin's career challenges observation first, for her literary character belongs to an older chapter of the period than that of Miss Cornwallis. She had by a few years too the priority of age. Miss Aikin may be said, to use Sir Nathaniel's phrase in Love's Labour's Lost, to have "eat paper" and "drunk ink" from her earliest years. Her intellectual training was derived from the Presbyterian society of the last century, that section of it which had left Calvinism behind, and had accepted Socinianism as its doctrinal creed, and which was characterized by a great zeal and ardour for mental progress, and a sovereign contempt for ancient bigotry. 1781 was the year of her birth. Her father was Dr. Aikin, a physician first practising at Warrington, then at Yarmouth, subsequently residing at Stoke-Newington, where he gave himself up to literary avocations, and edited the Annual Register, the Monthly Magazine, and another literary journal of the day, called the Athenæum, and was part author of the Biographical Dictionary, afterwards publishOur reflections on this subject have been ed by Dr. Enfield. A very favourite work for prompted by two publications of the past juveniles, not yet forgotten, called Evenings year the Memoir and Letters of Miss Aik-at Home, was also his composition, in conin, and the Letters of Miss Cornwallis. Both junction with his accomplished sister, Mrs. these ladies died within the last seven years; Barbauld, who, to a noted capacity for inboth lived through the period of which we structing the young, added herself also litehave been speaking; and both reflected very rary and poetical talent of a very refined distinctly, in the tone of their minds and the order, and was in all respects a most admirable bent of their studies, the character of that woman. Miss Aikin's friends and relations all period in its successive stages of development. round were literary in their tastes and reputaCircumstances and natural disposition, how- tions,-the Roscoes of Liverpool, the Taylors ever, had affixed considerable differences of Norwich, the Enfields, the Kerricks,— between them. The one, long known to the worthy names all in the annals of the pen. world as a historical writer of some preten- She was only in her seventeenth year when sion, and a friend and correspondent of seve- she took up the family trick of writing. Her ral eminent literary characters of her day, father's editorial functions gave her easy access had outlived her maximum of reputation; to reviews and magazines; and occasional and that reputation had been perhaps a little verses, essays, and translations were the first enhanced by the odour of "blue" notoriety flights of her ambition. The decided bent of still attaching to petticoated authors when her mind, however, was towards history; and she began to write. The other was entirely her first publication of any consequence was unknown to the world till death cancelled the Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth, the obligation of secrecy, and revealed her as which appeared in 1819, and drew on her no the writer of some anonymous works of more small degree of attention. It may indeed be original thought and more varied range of fairly considered a noteworthy book of its matter than even clever women have in gene- time. It had merits of its own, in a lively, ral proved themselves able to command- intelligent, impartial style of narrative, and a recluse shrinking from observation, not pos- was, we believe, the first of those works of sessing any influential connexion in the world historical gossip which Miss Strickland's inof letters, working patiently, earnestly, with defatigable labours have since made so famideep convictions, against the surface-current liar to the public, and to which Walter Scott's of her times, taking up a place with the pio- novels no doubt contributed a powerful imneers of new thought, even when old times pulse. But it should be remembered, and and associations beckoned her powerfully | Miss Aikin must have the credit due from |