money by the hundred millions to put into his sinking fund to pay the other part of the debt!

This is the policy which Allison-the most unexceptionably false of all men that ever lived in his views of trade and currency extols as "speaking volumes as to the wisdom of its financial system and the wonders which it would have effected toward the extinction of the debt had it been adhered to by its successors." Let our readers imagine a farmer, a merchant, a company, a corporation, a city, in such a principle! Loans to the extent of $1,000,000 were contracted only to be transferred to the commissioners of the sinking fund. Of course this became a principal means of swelling the debt to its present gigantic size. The administration had now two excellent means of raising money instead of one-for a while they would add to the debt, and when that became tedious they would plunder the sinking fund, so that they were enabled to introduce a pleasing variety into their official duties, with the incidental effect of making people think that the debt was being in some wonderful way provided for. Either of these contrivances, I venture to think, is quite enough for any minister. He will probably spend all the money the nation can afford if he is limited to a single one.

And so the monstrous delusion went on in EnglandGovernment now raising money as a loan for war expenses, now raising as much more for the sinking fund, now borrowing it from the sinking fund, with the result, at the end of the war, of a debt raised somehow to the awful total of £850,000,000. Yet the pretense of the sinking fund was still kept up, notwithstanding the severe blows dealt it by the Parliaments of 1816 and 1822, until in 1827 the whole machinery was thrown over and the system was declared a failure.

Laying aside the book SENATOR inquiringly exclaims: Did you never hear the story of the old negro who had served his time and became very rich, but did not buy himself because, as he said, the property was depreciating every year and the loss all fell on massa?

PRESIDENT: The question is too large to be entered upon here. These National Bank, Bondholding, and Bullionist Usurers, who exist only by grace of the Republican party's recent Monetary Bill, always are very solemn. SENATOR: How?

PRESIDENT: Any one of them would surpass a whole assembly of bishops for solemnity. Our Power-holding Privileged Class must not forget, however, that the ballot is still free, that the people at the next election may hurl us from power.

SENATOR: Every economist who enjoys any authority in the matters on which he writes contends that the Monetary Bill and Banking System violate the first rule of justice and economics by direct double taxation. Their compounded compound interest enhances the necessary cost of subsistence and are hindrances to commerce. The people are beginning to understand the mighty significance of National Banks.

PRESIDENT: Their evils are not of the most theoretical, academic, and idealistic character imaginable. Those public economists, our friends, the Populistic enemy, in their warfare upon the Banks and Monetary Bill have shown the shrewdest judgment.

SENATOR: We must meet their arguments.

PRESIDENT: The theme is too familiar to justify taking space here. The Monetary Bill is a selfish encroaching scheme of the privileged class, from whose cavernous maw nothing escapes.

SENATOR: Who planned the original National Bank System?

PRESIDENT: Secretary Chase, though he bitterly repented it afterward. In order to find a market for the bond, he recommended it on December 10, 1861. Since then, by monopolizing the whole of the circulating medium of the country, the National Banks have held the

purse-strings of society. The question is, apart from the dangerous power over the property and political affairs of the country which such a system confers upon a comparatively small class of people, Why should all other classes be compelled to pay the banking class interest on paper money based on bonds of the Government, for which the people are responsible, when they can have a better circulating medium, without interest, based on precisely the same security?

Except that avenging Nemesis, the Gold Standard, the object, as you say, of my lifelong denunciation, the National Bank System, reënforced by our Monetary Bill, constitutes a consolidated Trust beside which all others are pygmies.

The authorized capital stock of the banks on June 30 last was $607,871,245, and on June 30, 1899, $630,025,295, showing a decrease during the year of $22,154,050. The national bank circulation outstanding on June 30, 1899, aggregated $241,268,696, of which $205,264,094 was secured by bonds on deposit with the Treasurer of the United States and $36,004,602 by lawful money deposited on account of liquidating and insolvent associations and those reducing circulation. The increase of circulation during the year was $13,451,994.

The capital stock of the seventy-three banks organized during the year aggregated $14,825,000, divided, with respect to number and capital, by geographical divisions as follows:

SENATOR: What do the Populists claim?

PRESIDENT: Through the agency of the federal Government, upon which, under the Constitution, that duty devolves exclusively, the people in a collective capacity can issue their own notes, which cover the entire property and wealth of the nation, including gold, silver-everything, in a word, that can be reached by a tax warrant. These notes represent property to the amount inscribed on their face, which the Government was entitled to demand in the way of taxes at the time the notes were issued. It was in this sense that Calhoun declared that they were in reality "promises to receive," and bore no analogy to notes promising payment in money. As between citizen and government they are the same as money, and if the individual in turn is not obliged to receive them as the representative of property to the amount inscribed on their face, it is tantamount to the people repudiating individually what they have done collectively. It is, therefore, but a matter of simple justice and equity that Congress should declare the public notes of the Government a legal tender. It is also a matter of great advantage to the people, for when a public note is made a legal tender it acquires all the functions and serves all the purposes of money. The public note is not, then, one thing to the Government and another to the people, but its value becomes fixed and certain, as determined by law. A dollar legal-tender note of the Government, then, represents a dollar's worth of property-neither more nor less. It consequently corresponds to the unit of value fixed in the minds of the people by usage and education, and is a measure of value. It has, therefore, representative value and the power to measure and exchange property; in other words, all the attributes or functions of money. As it represents a dollar's worth of property, it cannot vary as a standard or measure of

value, except as the unit of value may vary in the minds of the people. This is not the case with money possessing intrinsic value, because its power as money then depends chiefly upon the value of the material of which it is made, and as that will fluctuate according to the laws of supply and demand, it cannot be used as a fixed measure of value. Thus gold fluctuates in value, and is itself, whether in coin ́or bullion, a thing to be measured. That a measure of value must possess intrinsic value is a dogma of the schools, which men of science, out of a desire to be consistent perhaps, adhere to-notwithstanding the fact that they are furnished with abundant proof to the contrary in almost every transaction of daily life-with as much pertinacity as the men of science and the churchmen of the seventeenth century adhered to the opinion that it was the sun that revolved around the earth and not the earth around the

sun.

When the federal Government pays out a dollar legaltender note for value received, it will be asked how, when, and where is the holder to obtain the property or value which it represents? The federal Government could say this note represents property, which the Government is now entitled to receive, and a tax warrant can produce the property any moment, if it takes the last dollar's worth in the country; but the Government is constantly receiving property or its equivalent in the shape of revenue, and there is no necessity to make a special levy of taxes to pay this particular dollar; nor is there any necessity to fix a time for its redemption in property. Being a legal tender, every individual in the nation will take it at the value inscribed on its face, and in the natural course of events it will redeem itself, in one sense, by returning to the federal Treasury in the form of taxes or revenue.

It was for this reason that in the case of North Carolina,