Is a millennium, perchance, to be reached in this cumulative way, as the power of a magnet is increased by the number of turns of the helix?"
"The sentiment of gain," I say, continuing these wise speculations," has been the leading factor in drawing the nations around the globe. Gold has been dangled as a bait: first, the hope of it by conquest; later, in mines of the precious metals. It has danced, Ariel-like, will-o'-the- wisp-like, before them. Tantalized, disappointed, after floundering on a ways, they have paused to develop the lands upon which they found themselves.
"But now at length, when the vacant spaces are full, and the need of subterfuge exhausted, the bait is cast down, to be gorged upon by those who find it. Never, till '49, had its followers been rewarded with such unstinted liberality. The treasure of the earth seemed piled up in the fastnesses of the far Pacific."
I recall that their yield since the year 1848 has reached the sum of $2,100,000,000, and is still going on at $80,000,000 a year. Gold, scattered at first in the very sands, was later washed out of the gravel-banks, by the hydraulic process, and later yet got by crushing the quartz rock. When gold began to diminish it was followed by silver. The great "Bonanza" mines of Nevada were discovered. "Consolidated Virginia" alone produced $65,000,000 in seven years.
IV.
What fabulous sums besides -to go back to town- the managers made by the ingenious process of "milking the market" I do not undertake to compute. The prices of this celebrated stock at successive dates, not far apart, were: first, $17 a share; then $1; $110; $42; $700; and then, in the final collapse, in 1875, little or nothing at all.
