Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine Volume 69 No 424 February 1851

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Publisher : Forgotten Books
ISBN 13 : 9781330974995
Total Pages : 784 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (749 download)

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Download or read book Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 69 written by and published by Forgotten Books. This book was released on 2015-07-08 with total page 784 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 69: January-June, 1851 On the other hand, the prodigious start which Europe took during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and which has implanted the European race for ever in the new hemisphere, is well known to have been mainly owing to the discovery of the mines of Mexico and Peru, and the continual rise of prices during nearly two centuries, which took place all over the world, from the constant and increasing influx of the precious metals drawn out of their rich strata. The greatest and most momentous contests which have taken place among nations, have been in a great degree determined by the discovery or use, by one of the belligerents, of an expansive currency, to which the other was for a time a stranger. The most memorable strife in antiquity, that between Rome and Carthage, on which depended whether Europe or Africa was to become the mistress of the civilised world, was in reality determined by a great extension of the Italian circulating medium during the second Punic war; and that dreadful contest was less brought to a successful issue by the firmness of the senate or the arms of Scipio, than by the wisdom of a decree which virtually, at the crisis of its fate, doubled the currency of the Roman republic.! The Transatlantic revolution was brought to a successful issue in the same way; and the independence of the United States is less to be ascribed to the imbecility of British counsels, or the wisdom of American generalship, than to the establishment of a paper currency, which sustained the efforts of the insurgent states when they had no other resources wherewith to maintain the contest. It was the assignats, as all the world knows, that set on foot those prodigious armies which, amidst the destruction of all private fortunes, enabled France, during the Reign of Terror, to repel the assault of all the European powers; and the coalition which at last overturned the empire of Napoleon was sustained by a vast system of paper currency, issued in 1813 in Germany, which, guaranteed by the four Allied powers, passed as gold from the Atlantic Ocean to the wall of China, and arrayed all the armies of Europe in dense and disciplined battalions on the banks of the Rhine. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.