A story is reported from Japan which, if true, would
certainly suggest that the island Empire is just now an object of the special favour of fortune. It is said that a goldfield has been discovered which, according to one account, will produce 2100,000,000, and, according to another, will yield £3,000,000 a year. The Government has had the field examined by its own mineralogists, and under an old preroga- tive has reserved its produce for its own use. The story reads like a fiction, possibly set afloat to facilitate the raising of a loan ; but it is more probable that it is only an exaggeration of the value of an actual find. The instinct of Englishmen is to doubt whether good luck ever happens so exactly when it is wanted ; but after all, it was the new wealth pro- duced by new advances in machinery which enabled Great Britain to endure the loans necessary for the long war with Napoleon. The theory is that war develops intelligence ; but if it does, it is in the most intermittent way. Intelligence does not seem to have been much developed in England by Marlborough's wars.
