to a place where it would be received at £3 17s. 10½d. an ounce. . . . It is too absurd, of course, to say . . . that the gold was remitted instead of the coffee, as a preferable mercantile operation. . . . There was not a country in the world in which so large a quantity of desirable goods could be obtained, in return for an ounce of gold, as in England. . . . Bonaparte . . . was constantly examining the English Price Current. . . . So long as he saw that gold was dear and coffee was cheap in England, he was satisfied that his 'Continental System' worked well."[1]
At the very time when Ricardo first formulated his theory of money, and the Bullion Committee embodied it in its parliamentary report, namely in 1810, a ruinous fall of prices of all English commodities as compared with those of 1808 and 1809 took place, while gold rose in value accordingly. Only agricultural products formed an exception, because their importation from abroad met with obstacles and their domestic supply was decimated by unfavorable crop conditions.[2] Ricardo so utterly failed to comprehend the role of precious metals as an international means of payment, that in his testimony before the Committee of the House of Lords in 1819 he could say "that drains for exportation would cease altogether so soon as cash payments
