"A greater danger to gold was war. The gold standard in the last century owed much to the intelligent management of the ... It owed much more to the British peace. In the next century warring governments would, as did that of Pitt, turn to their central banks for the money that they could not raise in taxes. And no bank, whatever its pretense to independence, would even think of resisting. Most dangerous of all would be democracy. The Bank of England was the instrument of a ruling class. Among the powers the Bank derived from the ruling class was that of inflicting hardship. It could lower prices and wages, increase unemployment. These were the correctives when gold was being lost; euphoria was excessive. Few or none foresaw that farmers and workers would one day have the power that would make governments unwilling to impose these hardships even in so righteous a cause as defense of the currency. However, it was early seen that the interests of the rich in these matters could differ from those of others. Writing in 1810, Ricardo [made that observation in a September 6 letter to the Morning Chronicle editor]... In England the triumph of Ricardo's monied class was complete or nearly so. In the United States, however, it was subject to the sharpest of challenges. In one form or another, this challenge was to dominate American politics for the first century and a half of the Republic. Only the politics of slavery would divide men more angrily than the politics of money."