(9)
the prices of all commodities had risen, and gold appeared to have risen in price only in common with them. If this effect is to be attributed to one and the same cause, that cause can only be found in the state of the Currency of this country. And it afterwards (p. 17.) reasons in the following manner: and that in the event of prices being raised in one country by an augmentation of its circulating medium, whilst no similar augmentation in the currency of a neighbouring country has led to a similar rise of prices, the currencies of those two countries will no longer continue to bear the same relative value to each other as before. And then the Reporters having formed all their reasonings upon these two assumptions, conclude, that the whole rise of the price of gold, and the fall of exchanges, were solely ascribable to an excess in the Issue of Bank Notes.
Here then we see the rise of prices accounted for per saltum at once. An excessive Issue of Notes is stated not only to be the cause, but the sole cause—and of course the Leaders of that Committee having presumed this point, their sole business was to prove it, if they could. They of course naturally avoided any thing like a fair inquiry into any other event or circumstance which might influence the question, and clash with their prejudice; but it was not to have been expected, that they should not have investigated even the very fact they asserted; viz. the existence of an Excess of Issue, but preferred taking it for granted, without any proof at all.
Now it seems to me—that when an excessive Issue of Notes was proclaimed as the sole cause of the extraordinary rise in the price of gold, the Committee were bound to prove that Excess.
They were bound to have shewn the quantity of Coin and Bank Notes which were in circulation before
