and Indirect Taxation in manipulating the legislation of the Government. Our opponents did not perceive in 1896 that the Gold Standard and its cluster of satellites afforded the Power-holding Class the necessary infernal machinery of Funded Debt, National Bank, High Protective Tariff, Gold Standard and Trust, to subsidize the physical forces of industry. The Democrats did not in that campaign understand the historical causation of the inequitable distribution of wealth. It is capable of being established beyond contradiction by going back to the proof of the statistics. I shall not weary you by throwing out more than a few hints by way of illustration. The interest-bearing securities, whether issued before or since the war, are exempt from taxation. The Power-holding Class holds to-day $1,026,482,990 securities which are exempt from taxation. Calculate the savings of the privileged classes on their original securities, nearly three thousand millions, with the interest compounded. What figures can express their gain totally escaping taxation. thus shifted from the uncrowned kings to the shoulders of the well-to-do and poorer class? Aside from the transition of this stupendous burden, remember the well-to-do and poorer class, as we have seen, by the close of 1895 had paid to the holders of these securities in principal and interest, under the Gold Standard, the enormous aggregate of $4,400,000,000. Credit 3,583 National Banks, whose resources on April 5 aggregated $4,639,138,160.36, with interest of one dollar for one hundred years at 1 per cent., and reduce the sum total to the amount which accrued during their forty years' existence.

Bear in mind the rate of interest is often higher in Wall Street than 30 per cent., and examine a table which shows the accumulation on $1,000 for sixty years, at the various rates of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 12, 18, 24, and 30 per cent. per

annum, taking off discount, as is always done by banks and brokers.

You have not yet reached the top of this infernal sublimity until you remember that the people during all thesc forty years have been paying interest at the same ratio to the National Banks upon the bonds they hypothecated with the Government, collateral for the issue of their circulatory currency.

If the expansibility of your arithmetic can calculate the

vastness of this range of profit, turn to the statistics which demonstrate with scientific accuracy.

Remember, at the same time that the effect of a single standard of either gold or silver is to double the value of the holdings of the Power-holding Class, and you can comprehend why the Power-holding Class prefers to believe the Gold Standard is commensurate with civilization itself.

SENATOR: As chairman of the Platform Committee you elected yourself and helped to elect Mr. Harrison President. Upon this plank "the Republican party is in favor of both gold and silver as money, and condemns the Democratic Administration in its efforts to demonetize silver."

Bimetallism requires no defense. It is not Bimetallism which is on trial. Its friends may safely concede for the purpose of their argument the blind, meaningless generalities urged against it. It is the colossal power of the indirect and direct taxation, their cruel and mischievous deception in the distribution of wealth and taxes, which outweighs thousands and thousands of sermons preached by the press against Constitutional Bimetallism. The Gold Standard stands convict of record. The Gold Standard brings us to the critical cardinal point. It has doubled not human goodness, human greatness, human nobleness, but the weight of taxation even upon valetudinarian impotence. If the distribution of wealth, remember, be a matter of human institution solely, the Gold Standard, in the glare of the dropsical statistics just examined, is the ablest and most authoritative exposition of the character and methods of its economy in the distribution of American taxation and wealth.

I never saw so clearly the universal, immutable, inexorable, magnificent working of the Gold Standard. It is demonstrable that the Act of 1873 set an economic force in

motion of national dishonesty and national poverty which debauched the public conscience and placed under the control of private interests, by well-regulated, selfish legislation, billions upon billions for the benefit of the Powerholding Class, and as if gliding to perdition the Republican party by the same standard seek to chain labor, which like a ghost is struggling out of the grave of taxation.

PRESIDENT: If wise, our friends the enemy, to save a stale, flat, languid and unprofitable controversy, might concede, with the crack of satire's whip, the ancient drowsy classics of those lurid exponents of gold opinions, Mr. Wells and Mr. Atkinson; the glimmering light of Mr. Horace White and Mr. Sumner, and the inebriated scales of Mr. Laughlin, together with the stark ignorance of an infinite variety of malevolent little foxes of the mutinous gold rabble breed professionally engaged in working the business of the Power-holding Class through such tools of the trade as "Sound Money" and banking circulars, etc., a literature more suitable to dough-kneaded understandings than the better-trained faculties and larger acquirements of statesmen.

SENATOR: Yes, Taxation, the Inequality of Man, and unjust distribution of wealth will storm the center of the Gold Standard's more ancient warriors-"The Silver Mines" "The Swindling of the Creditor with Cheap Money" "The Cost of Producing Silver;" "The Production of Silver;" "Changed Conditions Since 1873;" "The Claim that Free Coinage of Silver Would Degrade the United States to a Level with China and Silver-using Nations;" "The Flood of Gold ;" "The Fifty-cent Dollar;" "Currency of the Civilized World;" "the Increased Use of Credit;" "Prosperity"—each of those bogies of boobies, together with the jackasses, will be relegated to the rear, while the brave veterans of the Nebraskan press to the

front of Taxation, the very citadel of the Power-holding Class.

PRESIDENT: The masses will see the real issue and the Republicans can neither fight nor fly from Taxation. Taxation is a shadow whose dark folds encompass the globe.

SENATOR: Notwithstanding the pulling, the American fowl did not squawk until Trust, the lineal descendant and heir apparent of that avenging Nemesis of the Gold Standard, plucked his quills, and ever since the squawkings of American chickens have become audible throughout America.

PRESIDENT: That is a game at which two can play. Wait until Trust is in the hands of the people. Trust pulled the feathers too fast; it left the chick bare and bony.

SENATOR: Mr. President, aside from the taxation which it shifts from the patricians to the people and the harvest of wealth which the Gold Standard yields the privileged class and the lucrative prerogatives it confers upon National Bank millionaires, seriously, what is the objection to Independent Bimetallism?

PRESIDENT: Throughout my public life, as the McKinley record shows, I have been the foremost advocate of free coinage. I have always perceived the two great objects of Bimetallism:

First, to maintain an approximate par of exchange between gold-using and silver-using countries, and, secondly, to secure that greater stability of value which belongs to a money composed of the two metals thus joined in the currency than can possibly be attained under gold monometallism.

A greater stability in the compound mass of money composed of gold and silver thus joined in the coinage than can be enjoyed under gold monometallism or silver mono