etary question in the United States for years to come, for it is incredible that the financial wisdom which the people have acquired during the past few years can be soon forgotten. The vast industrial and commercial interests will have a period of repose, secure against the menace of monetary doctrinaires.

No sophistries or subtleties can make money or create a currency which is good for one and which is not equally good for the other. The interests of labor and capital are always identical. The one adheres to the Gold Standard and the consequent use of a large but limited volume of silver and paper currency, its full equivalent in effecting the changes of the people, while the other is for the maintenance of the single silver standard. The maintenance of the Gold Standard with silver circulating as currency at a parity with gold is the only bimetallism possible with so vast a difference existing between the value of the two metals in the markets.

Under the intensity and complexity of modern society— an unavoidable condition which is the outgrowth of ambition and civilization, and to which barbarism is a stranger -it is inevitable that economic operations must rest largely on confidence in our fellow-men and confidence in the future. So long as this confidence continues all will be well. When distrust takes its place all will be amiss.

PRESIDENT: Mr. Eckels' Commercial National Bank of Chicago has a capital stock of $1,000,000, undivided profits of $1,500,000, and a line of deposits aggregating $12,000,000.

SENATOR: Mr. Williams' Chemical National Bank of New York and many others far exceed in wealth the resources of the Commercial. The bankers understand the principles of economics as applied to the currency.

PRESIDENT: I remember the younger Pitt, the long

headed Prime Minister of England, said: "Let the Americans adopt their funding system and go into their banking institutions, and their independence will be a mere phantom."

Jefferson also said, in a letter to John W. Epps, under date of June 24, 1813:

to

And so the nation may continue to issue its bills as far as its wants require and the limits of its circulation will admit. But this, the only resource which the Government could command with certainty, the States have unfortunately fooled away-nay, corruptly alienated SWINDLERS AND SHAVERS. Say, too, as an additional evil, that the disposal funds of individuals have thus been withdrawn from improvement and useful enterprise and employed in the useless, usurious, and demoralizing practices of BANK DIRECTORS and their ACCOMPLICES.

Concerning loans for our second war with England, Thomas Jefferson wrote to Epps, September 11, 1813:

The question will be asked and ought to be looked at, What is to be the recourse if loans cannot be obtained? There is but one: Bank paper must be suppressed and the circulating medium must be restored to the nation, to whom it belongs. It is the only fund on which they can rely for loans; it is the only recourse which can never fail them, and it is an abundant one for every necessary purpose. Treasury bills bottomed on taxes, bearing or not bearing interest, as may be found necessary, thrown into circulation, will take the place of so much gold and silver, which last, when crowded, will find an efflux into other countries, and thus keep the quantum of medium at its salutary level. Let banks continue if they please, but let them discount for cash alone or for treasury notes.

Mr. Gladstone was without a doubt the greatest statesman in finance that England has produced within the present century. It had been the one ruling and undeviat

ing principle of his policy, alike in peace and in war, to make the annual revenues under all circumstances meet the annual expenditures of the Empire. He began to battle for this principle in 1853 when as chancellor of the exchequer he had to provide the means for the prosecution of the Crimean War. On this question he and Disraeli divided forever. The former proposed to provide the means of war by increasing the annual revenues; the latter proposed to borrow. Mr. Gladstone did adopt the method of paying as he went, and held to it until the overthrow of the Aberdeen ministry. He stoutly affirmed in presenting his first budget that, war or no war, the national debt of Great Britain should not be increased, but that the cost of supporting the British army in Asia should be met year by year by an increase in the income taxes and excises. This policy was supported by the Prince Consort, who declared it to be manly, statesmanlike, and honest; the policy of borrowing the Prince characterized as convenient, cowardly, and perhaps popular. He ought to have added, suicidal. As long as Gladstone remained in office he forced the revenues to meet the expenditures within the year. His principle through life had been, in every emergency, not to borrow, but to tax-that is, to take.

SENATOR: Washington said, in proportion as government rests on public opinion that opinion will be enlightened. Why not explain to the Power-holding Privileged Class, riding the Republican party like jockies, that it is impossible to found lasting political power on injustice?

PRESIDENT: They would reply with Addison, Gold is a wonderful cleaver of the undertaking. It dissipates every doubt and scruple in an instant, accommodates itself to the meanest capacities, silences the loud and clamorous, and brings over the most obstinate and inflexible. Philip of

Macedon refuted by it all the wisdom of Athens, confounded their statesmen, struck their orators dumb, and at length argued them out of their liberties into Imperialism.

SENATOR: Do you not behold the Nebraskan, that great tribune of the people, struggling like a mighty tree again to burst in the embrace of summer and shoot forth frondose boughs which will fill all America?

PRESIDENT: I foresee a mighty struggle, the last convulsive efforts of the pride and power of the Power-holding Privileged Class to keep America in subjection, but final triumph over all opposition is assured in the eternal principles of Justice.

SENATOR: You may say, Let us all be free. Let us have no partial freedom. Let the reversion of our broad domain descend to us unincumbered and free from the calamities and sorrows of human bondage in the Old World, but I tell you in their corrupted condition the Power-holding Class has given the American people, as Solon gave the Athenians, the best law they are able to bear. You seem to forget we are arguing the case as if of counsel for the people.

PRESIDENT: Let us wander from the left to the right to investigate these problems. William Pinkney, Rufus Choate, Reverdy Johnson, the lion of the tribe, in preparing their side, first tried the case of their opponents. Daniel Webster, in the Girard will case, made a defense. of the Christian religion. The record did not present it, but it was the only point in the case.

SENATOR: We have a Supreme Court precedent in the Income Tax. The judges not only argued but decided the case in favor of the public and reversed their judgment upon a new trial.

In well-rounded periods, Mr. President, you proclaimed for a quarter of a century the economic omnipotence of

silver. Now you trample under foot the equality of man, maintaining that the unity of the public power and its universality are a necessary consequence of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution in establishing by force of arms a government over the Philippines.

PRESIDENT: The public power, as in government by injunction, must be sufficient unto itself: it is nothing if not all.

SENATOR: What a capital mouthpiece you are, Mr. President!

PRESIDENT: The destructive, transforming, recreative influence of universal suffrage has not an orderly process of development. It unfolds itself in a series of capitalistic and industrial cataclysms.

From the first awakening of the Greek mind with Thales, onward through the speculations of Socrates, Plato, and Zeno; underneath the systems of Seneca and Marcus Aurelius and of Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Comte; in the utilitarianism of Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Bentham, Mills, and Herbert Spencer, the one consistent practical aim which connects together all the widely different efforts and methods of philosophy has been to discover in the nature of things a rational sanction for individual conduct.

SENATOR: That is the first, best, and only defense I have heard of the Republican Power-holding Class from a merely partisan standpoint. I fear the privileged classes are not enrolled in heaven.

PRESIDENT: They are much en evidence on earth. The unregulated and uncontrolled privileged classes are in reality merely the surviving Federalists adapted to new conditions. In the developmental progress of our civilization there must be a disillusionment of gigantic birth. A stern, aggressive, but constitutional ballot-box evolution