Well, the estimates vary greatly.  Soetbeer places the amount at $1,407,000,000 by the close of 1860; but Tooke and Newmarche have put it about $100,000,000 less.  In the same era the production of silver varied but a trifle from $40,000,000 a year.  A committee of the United States Senate, appointed for investigating the facts, reported that in the twelve years ending with 1860 the gold produced was $1,339,400,000; and in the next thirteen years, ending with 1873, it was $1,411,825,000.  Thus, in the thirteen years following the California discovery the stock of gold in the world was doubled, and in the twenty-five years ending with 1873 it was more than tripled.  Several economic writers have made the statement very much stronger than this, and M. Chevalier, in his famous argument for the demonetization of gold, written in 1857, declares that the production of gold as compared with silver had increased fivefold in six years and fifteenfold in forty years, and that, owing to the export of silver to Asia and its use in the arts, there would, in a very little while, be no possible method of maintaining the parity of the two metals in money at any ratio which would be honest and profitable.

And what was the real fact?  The ratio, which in 1849 was 15-78/100 of silver to 1 of gold in the London market, and the same in 1850, never sank below 15-19/100 to 1, and never rose above the ratio of 1849 till after silver was demonetized.  Why this wonderful steadiness?  The answer is easy.  In the eight years of 1853-60 France imported gold to the value of 3,082,000,000 f., or $616,000,000, and exported silver to the value of $293,000,000; in short, her bullion operations amounted to $909,000,000.  She stood it without a quiver; she grew and prospered as never before.  She resolutely refused to change her ratio.  Her mints stood open to all the gold and silver of the world, and thus did she save the world from a great calamity.

Scarcely, however, had the golden flood begun when the moneyed classes and those with fixed incomes raised a loud cry.  From the laboring producers no complaint was heard.  They never complain of increased coinage.  In the United States we knew nothing of this clamor, for we then had no large creditor class, no great amount of bonds, and very few people interested more in the value of money than in the rewards of labor.  In Europe, however, all the leading writers on finance and industries took part.  In 1852 M. Leon Faucher wrote:  “Every one was frightened ten years ago at the prospect of the depreciation of silver; during the last eighteen months it is the diminution in the price of gold that has been alarming the public.”  In England, the philosopher DeQuincey wrote that California and Australia might be relied upon to furnish the world $350,000,000 in gold per year for many years, thus rendering the metal practically worthless for monetary purposes, and another Englishman, as if resolved to go one better, declared that gold would soon be fit only for the dust pan.  M. Chevalier took up the task of convincing the nations that gold should be demonetized as too cheap for a currency, and of course the interested classes soon organized for action.