The shipments of the precious metal to
America and Europe soon became enormous--so enormous that the metal
was no longer precious. The price of gold dropped like a falling
stone, with accelerated velocity, and within a year every money centre
in the world had been swept by a panic. Gold was more common than
iron. Every government was compelled to demonetize it, for when once
gold had fallen into contempt it was less valuable in the eyes of the
public than stamped paper. For once the world had thoroughly learned
the lesson that too much of a good thing is worse than none of it.
Then somebody found a new use for gold by inventing a process by which
it could be hardened and tempered, assuming a wonderful toughness and
elasticity without losing its non-corrosive property, and in this form
it rapidly took the place of steel.
In the mean time every effort was made to bolster up credit. Endless
were the attempts to find a substitute for gold. The chemists sought
it in their laboratories and the mineralogists in the mountains and
deserts. Platinum might have served, but it, too, had become a drug in
the market through the discovery of immense deposits.
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