第一段：

Few people realized how fragile a system this was, built as it was on so narrow a base. The totality of gold ever mined
in the whole world since the dawn of time was barely enough to fill a modest two-story town house. Moreover, new
supplies were neither stable nor predictable, coming as they did in fits and starts and only by sheer coincidence arriving
in sufficient quantities to meet the needs of the world economy. As a result, during periods when new gold finds were
lean, such as between the California and Australian gold rushes of the 1850s and the discoveries in South Africa in the
1890s, prices of commodities fell across the world.

很少有人认识到这种制度有多么脆弱，其基础多么不牢。有史以来，世界上开采出来的所有黄金加起来也只不过能填满一幢中等的两层小楼。而且，新的黄金产量既不稳定，也不可预测，时多时少，很少能正好满足经济的需要。结果是，当发现新的金矿时（例如19世纪50年代加州和澳大利亚的黄金潮和19世纪90年代南非发现黄金），世界的商品价格就会下跌。

第二段：

It was a message whose time had come and gone. Ten years before he delivered that speech, two gold prospectors in South Africa, while out for a Sunday walk on a farm in the Witwatersrand, stumbled across a rocky formation that they recognized as gold-bearing reef. It proved to be an outcrop of the largest goldfield in the world. By the time of Bryan’s
speech, gold production had jumped 50 percent, South Africa had overtaken the United States as the world’s largest
producer, and the gold drought was over. Prices for all goods, including agricultural commodities, once again began to
rise. Bryan won the Democratic nomination then and twice more, in 1900 and 1908, but he was never elected
president.
风水轮流转，在布赖恩发表演讲的10年前的一个周末，南非的两位金矿勘探者于在威特沃特斯兰德（Witwatersrand）的一个农场散步时，偶然发现了一片金矿，后来这里成为世界最大的金矿。布赖恩演讲时，黄金产量暴涨了50%，南非取代美国成为最大的黄金生产国，黄金匮乏的时代结束了，包括农产品在内的所有商品价格再次开始上升。虽然布赖恩于1900年和1908年两次获得了民主党的选举提名，但始终没有当上总统。