As if to give countenance to this opinion, Dr. Syx now
announced, in the most public manner, that he had been deceived again,
and that the vein of free metal he had struck being exhausted, no
other had appeared. Accordingly, he said, he must henceforth rely
exclusively, as in the beginning, upon reduction of the ore.
Artemisium had proved itself an immense boon to mankind, and the new
era of commercial prosperity which it had ushered in already exceeded
everything that the world had known in the past. School-children
learned that human civilization had taken five great strides, known
respectively, beginning at the bottom, as the "age of stone," the "age
of bronze," the "age of iron," the "age of gold," and the "age of
artemisium."
Nevertheless, sources of dissatisfaction finally began to appear, and,
after the nature of such things, they developed with marvellous
rapidity. People began to grumble about "contraction of the currency."
In every country there arose a party which demanded "free money."
Demagogues pointed to the brief reign of paper money after the
demonetization of gold as a happy period, when the people had enjoyed
their rights, and the "money barons"--borrowing a term from
nineteenth-century history--were kept at bay.
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