She soon learned that all that glittered was not wealth, and that industries surfeited with metal and starved of raw materials must perish.

The unearned coin proved to be fairy gold in her coffers, turning to brown leaves and dust when she wanted to use it.

It became a drug in her markets; it could not lawfully be exported, and no {431} amount of it would purchase much honest labor from an indolent population fed on fantasies of wealth.
The modern King Midas, on whose dominions the sun never set, was cursed with a singular and to him inexplicable need of everything that money was supposed to buy.

His armies mutinied, his ships rotted, and never could his increasing income catch up with the far more rapidly increasing expenses of his budget.
The poverty of the people was in large part the fault of the government which pursued a fiscal policy ideally calculated to strike at the very sources of wealth.

While, under the oppression of an ignorant paternalism, unhappy Spain suffered from inanition, she was tended by a physician who tried to cure her malady by phlebotomy.