THE ARENA.

CONTENTS.

EVOLUTION: WHAT IT IS AND WHAT IT IS NOT.[1]

BY DR. DAVID STARR JORDAN,
President of Leland Stanford Junior University.

I. What Evolution Is.

This the age of evolution. The word is used by many men in many senses, and still oftener perhaps in no sense at all. By some it is spoken with a haunting dread as though it were another name for the downfall of religion and of social stability. Still others speak it glibly and joyously as though progress and freedom were secured by the mere use of the name. “The word evolution (Entwickelung),” says a German writer, “fills the vocal chords more perfectly than any other word.” It explains everything, and “puts the key to the universe into one’s vest pocket.”

So various has been the use of the word, so rarely is this use associated with any definite idea, that one hesitates to call himself an evolutionist. “Evolution” and “evolutionist” are almost ready to be cast into that “limbo of spoiled phraseology” which Matthew Arnold has found necessary for so many words in which other generations have delighted, and which they have soiled or spoiled by careless usage.

But as the word evolution is not yet put away, as it is the bugbear of many good people, and the “religion” of as many more equally good, it may be worth while to consider what it still means, and what it does not mean. For if we that use the word can agree on a definition, half our quarrel is over.

It seems to me that the word evolution is now legitimately used in four different senses. It is the name of a branch of science. It is a theory of organic existence. It is a method of investigation, and it is the basis of a system of philosophy.

The Science of Organic Evolution, or Bionomics. As a science, evolution is the study of changing beings acted upon by unchanging laws. It is a matter of common observation that organisms change from day to day, and that day by day some alteration in their environment is produced. It is a matter of scientific investigation that these changes are greater than they appear. They affect not only the individual animal or plant, but they affect all groups of living things, classes or races or species. No character is permanent, no trait of life without change. And as the living organism or group of organisms is undergoing alteration, so does change take place in the objects of the physical world about them. “Nothing endures,” says Huxley, “save the flow of energy and the rational order that pervades it.” The structures and objects change their forms and relations, and to forms and relations once abandoned they never return. But the methods of change are, so far as we can see, immutable. The laws of life, the laws of death, and the laws of matter never change. If the invisible forces which rule all visible things are themselves subject to modification and evolution, we have not detected it. Its cosmic movements are so fine as to defy human observation and computation. In the control of the universe we find no trace of “variableness nor shadow of turning.” “It is the law of heaven and earth, whose way is solid, substantial, vast, and unchanging.”

But the things we know do not endure. Only the shortness of human life allows us to speak of species or even of individuals as permanent entities. The mountain chain is no more nearly eternal than the drift of sand. It endures beyond the period of human observation. It antedates and outlasts human history. So does the species of animal or plant outlast and antedate the lifetime of one man. Its changes are slight even in the lifetime of the race. Thus the species, through the persistence of its type among its changing individuals, comes to be regarded as something which is beyond modification, unchanging so long as it exists.

“I believe,” said the rose to the lily in the parable—“I believe that our gardener is immortal. I have watched him from day to day since I bloomed, and I see no change in him. The tulip who died yesterday told me the same thing.”

As a flash of lightning in the duration of the night, so is the life of man in the duration of nature. When one looks out on a storm at night, he sees for an instant the landscape illumined by the lightning-flash. All seems at rest. The branches in the wind, the flying clouds, the falling rain are all motionless in this instantaneous view. The record on the retina takes no account of change, and to the eye the change does not exist. Brief as the lightning-flash in the storm is the life of man compared with the great time-record of life upon earth. To the untrained man who has not learned to read these records, species and types in life are enduring. Thus arose the theory of special creation and permanence of type, a theory which could not persist when the fact of change and the forces causing it came to be studied in detail.

But when man came to study the facts of individual variation and to think of their significance, the current of life no longer seemed at rest. Like the flow of a mighty river, never returning, ever sweeping steadily on, is the movement of all life. The changes in human history are only typical of the changes that take place in all living creatures. In fact, human history is only a part of one great life-current, the movement of which is everywhere governed by the same laws, depends on the same forces, and brings about like results.

The facts and generalizations of change constitute the subject-matter of evolution. And as the fact of life is a fundamental one, and in some degree modifies all phenomena which it concerns, we have as the central axis of the science in question, the study of organic evolution. In fact, while inorganic evolution, or orderly change in environment, exists, we do not know to what degree the laws and forces of organic evolution can be reduced to the same terms of expression. The theory of the essential and necessary unity of life and non-life, of mind and matter, is still a matter of philosophical speculation only. We can neither prove the truth of Monism, nor understand it; nor is the contrary hypothesis either comprehensible or credible. The fundamental unity of organic evolution and inorganic evolution is yet to be proved, while the laws which govern living matter are certainly in part peculiar to life. For this reason the evolution of astronomy, of dynamic geology, of geography, as well as the purely hypothetical evolution of chemistry, must be separated from life evolution. Cosmic evolution and organic evolution show, or seem to show, some divergence from each other. There are some elements which are not held in common, or which, at least, are not identical when measured in human terms. For the latter, the science of organic evolution, there is therefore certainly need of a distinctive term. This has been lately furnished by Professor Patrick Geddes, who has chosen the term bionomics. Bionomics (βιος, life; υομος, law or custom) is the science which treats of the changes in life-forms, and of the laws and forces on which these changes depend.

Even as thus restricted organic evolution, or bionomics, is the greatest of the sciences, including in its subject-matter, not only all natural history, not only processes like cell-division and nutrition, not only the laws of heredity, variation, natural selection, and mutual help, but all matters of human history, and the most complicated relations of civics, economics, or ethics. In this enormous science no fact can be without a meaning, and no fact or its underlying forces can be separated from the great forces whose interaction from moment to moment writes the great story of life.

And as the basis to the science of bionomics, as to all other science, must be taken the conception that nothing is due to chance or whim. Whatever occurs does so as the resultant of moving forces. Could we know and estimate these forces, we should have, so far as our estimate is accurate and our logic perfect, the gift of prophecy. Knowing the law, and knowing the facts, we should foretell the results. To be able in some degree to do this is the art of life. It is the ultimate end of science, which finds its final purpose in human conduct.

“A law,” according to Darwin, “is the ascertained sequence of events.” The necessary sequence of events it is, in fact, but man knows nothing of what is necessary, only of what has been ascertained to occur. Because human observation and logic can be only partial, no law of life can be fully stated. Because the processes of the human mind are human, with organic limitations, the study of the mind itself becomes a part of the science of bionomics. For it is itself an instrument or a combination of instruments by which we acquire such knowledge of the world outside of ourselves as may be needed in the art of living, in the degree in which we are able to practise that art.

The necessary sequence of events exists, whether we are able to comprehend it or not. The fall of a leaf follows fixed laws as surely as the motion of a planet. It falls by chance because its short movement gives us no time for observation and calculation. It falls by chance because, its results being unimportant to us, we give no heed to the details of its motion. But as the hairs of our head are all numbered, so are numbered all the gyrations and undulations of every chance autumn leaf. All processes in the universe are alike natural. The creation of man or the growth of a state is as natural as the formation of an apple or the growth of a snow-bank. All are alike supernatural, for they all rest on the huge unseen solidity of the universe, the imperishability of matter and the immanence of law.

We sometimes classify sciences as exact and inexact, in accordance with our ability exactly to weigh forces and results. The exact sciences deal with simple data accessible and capable of measurement. The results of their interactions can be reduced to mathematics. Because of their essential simplicity, the mathematical sciences have been carried to great comparative perfection. It is easier to weigh an invisible planet than to measure the force of heredity in a grain of corn. The sciences of life are inexact, because the human mind can never grasp all their data. Nor has the combined effort of all men, the flower of the altruism of the ages, that we call science been able to make more than a beginning in this study. But however incomplete our realization of the laws of life, we may be sure that they are never broken. Each law is the expression of the best possible way in which causes and results can be linked. It is the necessary sequence of events, therefore the best sequence, if we may imagine for a moment that the human words “good” and “bad” are applicable to world-processes. The laws of nature are not executors of human justice. Each one has its own operation, and no other. Each represents its own tendency towards cosmic order. A law in this sense cannot be “broken.” A broken law would be a discarded universe. “If God should wink at a single act of injustice,” says the Arab proverb, “the whole universe would shrivel up like a cast-off snake-skin.” If God should wink at any violated law the universe would vanish.

Not long ago, in an examination in a theological seminary, the question was asked of the candidates for the ministry, “Is it right to pray for a change of season?” The candidates thought that it was not, for the relations which produce winter and summer are fixed in the structure of the solar system and cannot be altered for man’s pleasure or man’s need. “Is it right to pray for rain?” The candidates generally thought that it was, because the conditions of rain are so unstable that a little change in one way or another would bring rain or fair weather, and that it was proper to ask for such change, as it did not concern the economy of the universe.

The third question was: “When the signal service of the United States is well established, so that weather conditions are perfectly known, will it then be right to pray for rain?” And the candidates for the ministry could not tell, for they began to see that even simple changes of weather may have the strength of the whole universe behind them. It has never yet rained when by any possibility it could do otherwise. It has never failed to rain when rain was possible. The Spanish padres in California, wise in their generation, allowed prayers for rain only in winter, when the wind was in the south. The wind is only in the south when the air is affected by a cyclonic movement, and this in the California winter means rain.

We hear good men say sometimes that the crying need of this strong and sceptical age is that it may see some law of nature definitely broken, that it may rain when rain is impossible, or that some burning bush may, unconsuming, proclaim that the force which is behind all law is also above it and can break or repeal all laws at will.

Emerson somewhere speaks of the purpose in life—“To be sound and solvent.” As his life was in all ways “sound and solvent,” perhaps such rule of conduct was his own. But one may say, That is only a rule. The man himself should be all rules and requirements of his own establishment. Let Mr. Emerson show that his life is above his principles. Let him break these rules. Let him be “unsound and insolvent” for a time. Then only will his greatness appear.

The laws of nature are the expression of the infinite soundness and solvency. They will not be broken, nor through their unsoundness and insolvency will the “heavens roll away as a scroll,” nor “the universe shrivel up as a cast-off snake-skin.”

In the growing recognition of law has been the progress of science. From the casting aside of human notions of chance and whim the “warfare of science” has had its rise. For every event carried over into the realm of law some man has given his life. As the Panama railroad is said to have cost the life of a man for every cross-tie, so has every step in the progress of science. And such men!

Many a time in the growth of humanity has it been necessary that the wisest, clearest, most humane, should die on the stake or the gibbet or the cross, that men should come to realize the power of an idea; that they should know the value of truth.

Evolution as a Theory of Organic Development, or Darwinism. In a different sense the word evolution is applied to the theory of the origin of organs and of species by divergence and development. This theory teaches that all forms of life now existing or that have existed on the earth have sprung from a common stock, which has undergone change in a multitude of ways and under varied conditions, the forces and influences producing such change being known as the “factors of organic evolution.” All characters and attributes of species and groups have developed with changing conditions of life. The homologies among animals are the result of common descent. The differences are due to various influences, chief among these being competition in the struggle for existence between individuals and between species, whereby those best adapted to their surroundings lived and reproduced their kind.

This theory is now the central axis of all biological investigation in all its branches, from ethics to histology, from anthropology to bacteriology. In the light of this theory every peculiarity of structure, every character or quality of individual or species, has a meaning and a cause. It is the work of the investigator to find this meaning as well as to record the fact. “One of the noblest lessons left to the world” by Darwin is this, Mr. Frank Cramer tells us,—“this, which to him amounted to a profound, almost religious, conviction, that every fact in nature, no matter how insignificant, every stripe of color, every tint of flowers, the length of an orchid’s nectary, unusual height in a plant, all the infinite variety of apparently insignificant things, is full of significance. For him it was an historical record, the revelation of a cause, the lurking-place of a principle.”

According to the theory of evolution every structure of to-day finds its meaning in some condition of the past. The inside of an animal tells what it really is, for it bears the record of heredity. The outside of an animal tells where its ancestors have been, for it bears record of concessions to environment. Similarity in essential structure is known as homology. By the theory of evolution homology, wherever it is found, is proof of blood-relationship.

The theory of organic evolution through natural law was first placed on a stable footing by the observations and inductions of Darwin. It has therefore been long known as Darwinism, although that term has been usually associated with the recognition of natural selection as the great motive power in organic change. Darwinism was at first regarded as a “working hypothesis.” It is now an integral part of biological science, because all opposing hypotheses have long since ceased to work. It is as well attested as the theory of gravitation, and its elements are open to less doubt. All investigations in biology must assume it, as without it most such investigations would be impossible. Naturalists could no more go back to the old notion of special creation for each species and its organs than astronomers could go back to the old notion of guiding angels as directors of planetary motion. Without the theory of organic development through natural selection, the biological science of to-day would be impossible.

Evolution as a Method of Study. In a third sense the word evolution is applied to a method of investigation. It is the study of present conditions in the light of the past. The preliminary work of science is the descriptive part. This involves accuracy of observation and precision of statement, but makes no great demands on the powers of logical analysis and synthesis. The easy work of science is largely already done. Those who would continue investigation must study not only facts and structures, but the laws that govern them. In the words of John Fiske, “Whether plants or mountains or mollusks or subjunctive moods or tribal confederacies be the things studied, the scholars who have studied them most fruitfully were those who have studied them as phases of development. Their work has directed the current of thought.” The most difficult problems in life are susceptible of more or less perfect solution if approached by the method of evolution. They cannot be even stated as problems in any other terms. In every science worthy of the name the history of origins and the study of developing forces must take a leading part.

Evolution as a System of Cosmic Philosophy. In a fourth sense the word evolution has been applied to the philosophical conceptions to which the theory of evolution gives rise. Philosophy is not truth. When it is so it becomes science. At the best it points the way to truth. The broader the inductive basis of any system of philosophy, the greater its value as an intellectual help. The system of Herbert Spencer, the greatest exponent of the philosophy of evolution, is based wholly on the results of scientific investigation. It consists of a series of more or less broad and more or less probable deductions from the facts and laws already known. Systems like these, which rest on scientific knowledge, do not rise high above it. They can therefore be revised or rewritten as knowledge increases. They provide the means for their own correction. Systems resting on aphorisms or assumptions or definitions must disappear as knowledge increases.

Philosophy is never wholly identical with truth. The partial truth which it may contain becomes wholly error with the advance of science. The growth of exact knowledge transforms the truth in philosophy into science, leaving the absolute falsehood as the final residuum.

From this necessary fact comes the ultimate decay of all creeds or philosophic formulæ. Throughout the ages science and philosophy have been in conflict. Science is the same to all minds capable of grasping its conclusions. Philosophy changes with the point of view. It is the evanescent perspective in which the facts and phenomena of the universe are seen. This can never be the same under changing times and conditions. With the larger knowledge of to-morrow, there will be large modifications in the accepted philosophy of evolution. Each succeeding generation will give to the applications of the laws of organic life a different philosophical expression.

II. What Evolution Is Not.

In these four senses the word evolution is used with some degree of accuracy. But in the current literature of the day the word has many other meanings, some of them very far from any just basis. Some things which evolution is not we may here notice briefly.

Evolution is not a theory that “man is a developed monkey.” The question of the immediate origin of man is not the central or overshadowing question of evolution. This question offers no special difficulties in theory, although the materials for exact knowledge are in many directions incomplete. Homologies more perfect than those connecting man with the great group of monkeys could not exist. These imply the blood-relationship of the human race with the great host of apes and monkeys. As to this there can be no shadow of a doubt. And as similar homologies connect man with all members of the group of mammals, similar blood-relationship must exist. And homologies, less close but equally unmistakable, connect all backboned animals one with another; and the lowest backboned types are closely joined to worm-like forms not usually classed as vertebrates.

It is perfectly true that, with the higher or anthropoid apes, the relations with man are extremely intimate. But man is not simply “a developed ape.” Apes and men have diverged from the same primitive stock, apelike, manlike, but not exactly the one or the other. No apes or monkeys now extant could apparently have been ancestors of primitive man. None can ever “develop” into man. As man changes and diverges, race from race, so do they. The influence of effort, the influence of surroundings, the influence of the sifting process of natural selection, acts upon them as it acts upon man.

The process of evolution is not progress, but better adaptation to conditions of life. As man becomes fitted for social and civic life, so does the ape become fitted for life in the tree-tops. The movement of monkeys is towards “simianity,” not humanity. The movement of cat-life is towards felinity, that of the dog-races towards caninity. Each step in evolution upward or downward, whatever it may be, carries each species or type farther from the primitive stock. These steps are never retraced. For an ape to become a man he must go back to the simple characters of the simple common type from which both have sprung. These characters are shown in the ape-baby and in the human embryo in its corresponding stages. For ancestral traits lost in the adult are preserved in the young. This comes through the operation of the great force of race-memory, we call heredity.

Evidence of biology points to the descent of all mammals, of all vertebrates, of all animals, of all organic beings, from a common stock. Of all the races of animals, the anthropoid apes are nearest man. Their divergence from the same stock must be comparatively recent. Man is the nomadic, the apes the arboreal, branch of the same great family.

Evolution does not teach that all or any living forms are tending towards humanity. It does not teach, as in Bishop Wilberforce’s burlesque, “that every favorable variety of the turnip is tending to become man.” It is not true that evolutionists expect to find, as Dr. Seelye has affirmed, “the growth of the highest alga into a zoöphyte, a phenomenon for which sharp eyes have sought, and which is not only natural but inevitable on the Darwinian hypothesis, and whose discovery would make the fame of any observer.”

It is no wonder that a clear thinker should have rejected “the Darwinian hypothesis,” when stated in such terms as this. The line of junction in evolution is always at the bottom. It is the lowest mammals which approach the lowest reptiles. It is the lower types of plants which approach the lower types of animals. It would be the lowest alga, to use Dr. Seelye’s illustration, which would be transmutable into the lowest zoöphyte. It is the unspecialized, undifferentiated type from which branches diverge in different ways. Humanity is not the “goal of evolution,” not even that of human evolution. There will be no second “creation of man,” except from man’s own loins. There will not be a second Anglo-Saxon race, unless it has the old Anglo-Saxon blood in its veins.

Adaptation by divergence—for the most part by slow stages—is the movement of evolution. While occasional leaps or sudden changes occur in the process, they are by no means the rule. In most cases of “saltatory evolution,” the suddenness is in appearance only. It comes from our inability to trace the intermediate stages. When an epoch-making character is acquired, as the wings of a bird or the brain of man, the process of readjustment of other characters goes on with greatly increased rapidity. But this rapidity of evolution is along the same lines as the slower processes. Radical changes from generation to generation never occur. We do not expect to find birds arising from a “flying-fish in the air, whose scales are disporting into feathers.” A flying-fish is no more of the nature of a bird than any other fish is. A cow will never give birth to a horse, nor a horse to a cow. The slow operation of existing causes is the central fact of organic evolution, as it is of the evolution of mountains and valleys. Seasons change as the relations which produce them change. But midsummer never gives way to midwinter in an instant. Nor does the child in an instant become a man, though in some periods of growth epoch-marking causes may make development more rapid. Life is conservative. The law of heredity is the expression of its conservatism. It changes slowly, but it must constantly change, and all change is by necessity divergence.

There is in nature no single “law of progress,” nor is progress in any group a necessity regardless of conditions. That which we call progress rests simply on the survival of the better adapted, their survival being accompanied by their reproduction. Those that live repeat themselves. The “innate tendency towards progression” of the early evolutionists is a philosophic myth. Progress and degeneration are alike the resultants of the various forces at work from generation to generation on and within a race or species. The same forces which bring progress to a group under one set of conditions will bring degradation under another. In their essence the factors of evolution are no more laws of progress than the attraction of gravitation is. Cosmic order comes from gravitation. Organic order comes from the factors of evolution. Evolution is simply orderly change.

Evolution is not Spontaneous Generation. There is no necessary connection between the one theory and the other. Spontaneous generation, or birth without parentage, on the part of small or useless creatures was accepted in early times without question. As men began to observe these animals more carefully, the fact of their spontaneous generation was doubted. A great step was made when it was found that to screen meat from flies would protect it from maggots. A greater step came in our own time when it was proved that to screen infusions from air dust is to protect them from putrefaction or fermentation. Fermentation is “life without air.” It is the decomposition of sugar by minute creatures who disintegrate it in their life processes. Putrefaction and decay are also the same in nature. There is literal truth in Carlyle’s statement that there is still force in a fallen leaf, “else how could it rot?” It is the force of the minute organisms hidden in the leaf, and whose life is the leaf’s decay. The decay and death of men from contagious diseases is known to be due to life processes of minute organisms, as is the gangrene which follows unskilful surgery. The study of the “fauna and flora” within living organisms has now become a science of itself, demanding the greatest care in observation and the most complete of appliances. “Omne vivum ex vivo,” “all life from life,” was an aphorism of the naturalists of a century or two ago. It was to them a new and broad generalization. It has not yet been set aside. The classic experiments of Tyndall show that this law applies to all creatures we have yet recognized or classified. As far as science can tell, spontaneous generation is still a myth, having no basis in observation, no warrant in experiment. It remains as a pure deduction from the philosophical conception of Monism, incapable of proof, insusceptible of refutation. The argument for it is chiefly this: Life exists on a globe once lifeless. How did life begin? If not through spontaneous generation, how did it come? Must it not have been by the operation of those laws and forces which through all time change lifeless into living matter? Very likely, but we do not know. We know nothing whatever of such laws and forces, and we gain nothing by veiling our ignorance under a philosophical necessity.

Moreover, if spontaneous generation occurs as a resultant of any forces, like forces would produce it again. We have never known it to occur. Should it occur the organisms thus produced would have no bonds of blood-relationship with those already in existence. With these they should show no homology, as they could have no inheritance in common. But all known organisms have common homologies. The factors of organic evolution are essentially the same for all. The unity of life amid all its diversity seems to point to origin from a common stock. If not from one stock, the lines of division between one and another are hidden from us. The study of embryology breaks down the time-honored branch lines of vertebrates, articulates, mollusks, and radiates. The groups of animals are more numerous, more complex, and more intertangled than Cuvier and Agassiz thought. The number of primary branches of animals or plants is uncertain, their boundaries undefined.

If spontaneous generation exists, it is a factor in evolution. If it is a factor, our explanation of the meaning and nature of homology must be fundamentally changed. But it may be that it should be changed. We cannot show that spontaneous generation does not exist. All we know is that we have no means of recognizing it. If there is now spontaneous generation of protoplasm, it cannot take the form of any creature we know. An organism fresh from the mint of creation would be too small for us to see with any microscope. It would be too simple for us to trace by any instrumentality now in our possession. It could contain but a few molecules, and a molecule in a drop of water is as small as an orange beside the sun. Our race of creatures, spontaneously generated, without concessions to environment, would grow hoary with the centuries before it came to our notice. Its descendants would have belonged for ages to the unnumbered hosts of microbes before we should be aware of its creation.

Evolution is not a creed or a body of doctrine to be believed on authority. There is no saving grace in being an evolutionist. There are many who take this name and have no interest in finding out what it means or in making any application of its principles to the affairs of life. For one who cares not to master its ideas, there is no power in the word. Evolution is not a panacea or a medicine to be applied to social or personal ills. It is simply an expression of the teaching of enlightened common sense as to the order of changes in life. If its principles are mastered a knowledge of evolution is an aid in the conduct of life, as knowledge of gravitation is essential in the building of machinery.

There is nothing “occult” in the science of evolution. It is not the product of philosophic meditation or of speculative philosophy. It is based on hard facts, and with hard facts it must deal.

It seems to me that it is not true that “Evolution is a new religion, the religion of the future.” There are many definitions to religion, but evolution does not fit any of them. It is no more a religion than gravitation is. One may imagine that some enthusiastic follower of Newton may, for the first time, have seen the majestic order of the solar system, may have felt how futile was the old notion of guiding angels, one for each planet to hold it up in space. He may have received his first clear vision of the simple relations of the planets, each forever falling toward the sun and toward each other, each one by the same force forever preserved from collision. Such a man might have exclaimed, “Great is gravitation; it is the new religion, the religion of the future!” In such manner, men trained in dead traditions, once brought to a clear insight of the noble simplicity and adequacy of the theory of evolution, may have exclaimed, “Great is evolution; it is the new religion, the religion of the future!”

But evolution is religion in the same sense that every truth of the physical universe must be religion. That which is true is the truest thing in the world, and the recognition of the infinite soundness at the heart of the universe is an inseparable part of any worthy religion.

But, whether religion or not, the truths of evolution must be their own witness. They can be neither strengthened nor controverted by any authority which may speak in the name of philosophy or of theology or of religion. “Roma locuta est; causa finita est” is not a dictum which science can regard. Her causes are never finished. No power on earth can give beforehand the answer to her questions. Her only court of appeal is the experience of man.

HAS WEALTH A LIMITATION?

BY ROBERT N. REEVES.

There is in the government of human affairs one order that is best for all. What that order is and how it is to be attained should be the great problem for all who have at heart the betterment of the human race.

Never in the history of our country were the people confronted with greater social problems than they are to-day. The strikes, boycotts, and general discontent of late years prove conclusively that there is yet much room for improvement in our social order. What mean the great outcry and muttering of the masses? What means the cry from the vast army of discontented which wells up from the very heart of the nation, unless it signifies the rumbling which is often heard before the storm? Gloss it over as we will, the fact stands out as prominent as ever, that there is something radically wrong with our present economical system.

Many remedies have been suggested, many reforms have been inaugurated with the purpose of relieving the poverty and misery which press so heavily upon a large majority of the people. Stop immigration! Prohibit invention! exclaim some. The population is increasing too fast! reply others. And so the many reforms are advocated, all of which are discussed with more or less fairness. But when it is suggested that wealth is becoming too concentrated, that limitations should be placed upon it, the cry immediately goes up that he who suggests such a remedy is an anarchist, and one whose name should be synonymous with whatever is dangerous, lawless, and subversive.

Nevertheless, the question of wealth limitation cannot be dismissed with threats, epithets, or sneers. It will not dismiss itself, and we cannot dismiss it. Every observant person must admit that the great concentration of wealth, whether it be in corporations, trusts, or individuals, has reached a point dangerous to the future prosperity of the nation.

Millions of people idle, wealth piled up for the few by the toil of the many, paupers and millionaires on every side, and the conditions growing worse and worse,—these things are enough to make even the most optimistic painfully apprehensive of the future. Our government in some respects is in no better condition than was the old Roman Empire just before its fall, as described by James Anthony Froude. If we are to believe that eminent historian, the Roman Empire was crushed by the same power of unlimited, concentrated wealth that to-day is destroying the life, the liberty, and the happiness of the many in the United States. In mediæval Italy, too, popular freedom was lost through a moneyed oligarchy and proletariat. So in every country where individual wealth has transcended the bounds of justice, the people—the toilers—have eventually been enslaved.

Ours is fast becoming a moneyed nation; and a moneyed nation is generally a weak one. Superfluity of riches, like superfluity of food, causes weakness and decay. Individual prosperity or the prosperity of a community does not mean general prosperity, or the prosperity of a nation. Thus it has been shown that, in New York and Massachusetts and those States in which the greatest wealth is concentrated, the largest proportion of paupers are to be found. In 1833, when Tocqueville visited America, he was struck by the equal distribution of wealth and the absence of capitalists. Half a century later, when James Bryce, author of “The American Commonwealth,” visited our country, the trusts, monopolies, and concentrated wealth so amazed him that he exclaimed: “I see the shadows of a new structure of society—an aristocracy of riches.”

Fifty years ago there were no great fortunes here, and in fact but few fortunes that could be called large, and in those days there was comparatively little poverty. Now we have many gigantic fortunes and a vast number ranging from $100,000 to $10,000,000. In the past, wealth being more equally distributed, there was but little class distinction, but there were a far greater number of what might be called fortunes, and a noticeable exemption from that pauperism which has become chronic of late years.

The Probate-Court records of the various States disclose the fact that millionaires are becoming more numerous, while the smaller property-owners are gradually sinking into the multitude of people possessing nothing. In a valuable article by Eltweed Pomeroy on “The Concentration of Wealth,”[2] some interesting figures and diagrams are given, proving from probate records the exact extent to which small fortunes have been crowded out or merged into enormous ones. These records are valuable because they are official. But while they prove the extent to which wealth is concentrated, they do not disclose the misery which that wealth is causing. For that, we must look to the conditions about us. And in doing so it is not necessary to be a philosopher in order to see the havoc which concentrated wealth has wrought in recent years. Every day, it has been declared, America is over four million dollars richer at night than in the morning. Who receives this wealth? Surely not those who toil; else they would not suffer so. They receive little of it. The national wealth, great as it is, slips through their fingers to be collected in the vast reservoirs of the moneyed aristocracy. They work, but it is the work of those who labor to produce, but who receive none of that which is produced.

It is this condition that causes so many to declare that the present distribution of wealth does not conform to the principles of justice. And how can it be otherwise, when all wealth passes through the hands of the producers and stops only when it reaches those who possess most? Thus wealth is becoming with us not a power for general good, but a power given to the few to control the many—a power of placing upon the masses a yoke little better than slavery itself. The rich, becoming further and further removed from the poor, are also becoming conscious of being in a measure the proprietors of the poor. The poor have a knowledge of this fact, and the strikes, boycotts, and general discontent are but the expression of that knowledge.

In no country in the world does wealth, individual and corporate, exert such an influence as in the United States, and as a consequence, human life is becoming lamentably cheap. Capital is taking the place of men, and is valued more than men. Property is becoming sacred, human life profane. Laws are being made not for the good of humanity, but for the sake of property. One instance may be mentioned here: in the spring of 1896 a bill was before Congress to remove all criminal cases from the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court of the United States. It was argued by those in favor of the bill that much of the time of the Supreme Court was consumed listening to criminal cases (cases involving life and liberty), while high-priced corporation lawyers, whose cases involved millions of dollars, were required to wait in Washington until the criminal cases were disposed of. The bill naturally passed the Senate, but was defeated in the House.

This bill was but one of many indications that, in the eye of the law, property is becoming of more value than life or liberty.

In Benjamin Franklin’s time it was proposed to make the possession of a certain amount of property a prerequisite for voting. The amount would at the time have bought one ass. Franklin characteristically argued: If a man with an ass could vote, and did vote, but when the ass died the man could not vote, who was it, in fact, voted—the man or the ass? Franklin’s argument would hold good against many of the laws advocated to-day—laws in which the object is the stability of property rather than the freedom or happiness of man. This condition of affairs, this conflict between the right of liberty on the one hand, and the right of property on the other, has created a great political problem. Has the state a right to limit wealth? Is there a limit to the accumulations of individuals and corporations? Has the state the power to tax concentrated wealth out of existence when such wealth has become detrimental to the public peace and prosperity? In other words, has the state the power to prevent the acquisition of wealth from becoming a public curse? Government, if it stands for anything, stands for the public interests, and one of the objects of government should be the protection of its citizens from the encroachments of accumulated wealth.

Great individual wealth is an anti-social interest. It is the ascendency of individuals over the interests of the public. Individuals have, it is true, a certain amount of liberty, but it cannot be denied that society has the right to modify the liberty of the individual where such liberty is but the slavery of the public. The right to live also implies the right to use the things about us which go to make life comfortable and enjoyable, and which have not been already appropriated by others. It is evident, however, that the use of anything by one must necessarily take from the personal liberty of all others who otherwise would be able to use it. And it is perfectly plain that just in proportion as one’s wealth increases, the wealth of others must decrease. This to a certain extent is legitimate, and cannot be prevented. But when the wealth of one increases to such an extent as to deprive others of food, shelter, and even existence itself, it infringes upon the equality of personal liberty far more than could any law that placed a limit to individual wealth. When men are starving, when paupers are increasing, when to the misfortune of poverty is added the curse of industrial slavery, when the great concentration of wealth affects the life and liberty of all, is not a law just which takes from a few a portion of their wealth and indirectly restores it to the hands of the many? Does not the right to property involve and rest upon the admission of the right to live?

Cardinal Manning startled the world some years ago when he declared: “The obligation to feed the hungry springs from the natural right of every man to life and to the food necessary to the sustenance of life. So strict is this natural right that it prevails over all positive laws of property. Necessity has no law, and a starving man has a right to his neighbor’s bread.”

Strong words these for a cardinal. Sentimental philosophy it may be called, but it is the philosophy of justice. Enormous wealth has always been irreconcilable with equality. Its growth has caused the downfall of many democracies. Will it bring about the ruin of the greatest democracy in history? Are we, with the awe with which we regard the institution of property, becoming a nation of millionaires and mendicants?

Property is only absolutely safe when those who hold it are far more numerous than those who do not. When the middle class disappears from a nation and the property falls into the hands of a few over-rich men, then property is unsafe. We call such a condition an aristocracy of money, and an aristocracy of money is always the child of a degenerated or degenerating democracy. Some people, however, regard the concentration of wealth as an indication of progress. In matters political the obstacle is often taken for the cause. Monopolies, trusts, and other forms of concentrated wealth are regarded by some as the blessings of a prosperous nation. But examined in the light of history we find that concentrated wealth has always been a means of obstructing if not of destroying a nation. Our nation is not an exception. We cannot say that the destructive power of concentrated wealth is not now felt. All that is necessary is to observe the conditions about us. Whenever the people of a nation become subservient and dependent, and are oppressed and abused because they are so, whenever there is little general prosperity but a great deal of prosperity for a few, we naturally come to the conclusion that the cause of the misery and lack of general prosperity is the great concentration of wealth in the hands of the few. It is this conclusion, arrived at by what are termed the masses, that has caused the many conflicts of recent years between labor and capital. And such conflicts are natural. Man always revolts when he suspects his misery is the consequence of a social order capable of reformation. Force, of late years, has often been called upon to subdue the spirit of resentment which agitates the breasts of the poorer classes. The militia of the various States and even government troops have been called upon in order to preserve property and also maintain the supremacy of concentrated wealth.

How long this can go on before a change comes we do not know. It cannot be maintained long. Unless some law is enacted that will stop the encroaching power of wealth, things will go on until the inequality becomes so glaring, so oppressive, that the pent-up social waters, gathering force, will break through the wall of concentrated wealth and allow society once more to regain its natural level. Every statesman, every thinker, should know that we cannot expect a healthy growth with class arrayed against class. Every strike, every riot, is a retrogressive step in our nation’s history. If our American civilization is to endure and progress we must bring about a change in the distribution of wealth. If conditions are such as to be beneficial to a small number and injurious to society in general, those conditions should be changed. Unless limited, the alarming development and aggressiveness of great capitalists and powerful corporations will eventually lead to the absolute degradation of the toiling masses. Unless checked, it will continue to grow until it usurps the entire legislative and executive branches of our government, and, like a huge vampire, slowly draws the life-blood from every healthy, helpful creature. This power of wealth is the greatest danger that has threatened our country since the civil war, and against it we must constantly be on our guard. If the power is permitted to grow it may become too late, and can then be remedied only by putting class against class—by revolution, which always means the rejoicing of the poor at the downfall of their oppressors.

This, then, is to be the battle of the future—concentrated wealth on one hand, concentrated poverty on the other. The battle should not be one of force, but one of reason and agitation until wealth shall be bound by proper constitutional limitations; a battle in which law shall triumph; for the true remedy, the remedy most conducive to equality, lies in legislation. But this legislation should be immediate. If we desire to prevent actual war between class and class, it is imperative that a legal check at once be placed upon the growing power for evil of aggregated wealth.

The limitation of wealth by law has received the approval of some of the most gifted as well as philanthropic of minds. In our own country such men as Horace Greeley, Theodore Parker, and William Ellery Channing have advocated it. Still, a ready objection of some against the limitation of wealth is that any attempt to remedy by legislation the inequality of fortune at once infringes upon the right of personal liberty. Have we no laws in existence now which infringe upon the right of personal liberty? Do not our usury laws take some rights from the individual? Does not our custom-house law, which permits the trunks of every new arrival to be searched, infringe somewhat upon the right of personal liberty? The citizen who would object to these laws would have but a very narrow conception of the true purpose of government. If we examine our laws closely we shall find many that encroach upon individual liberty for the sake of public good. Then why should any objection be made to those laws which tend to limit wealth?

Undoubtedly a tax levied upon all incomes, which would be progressively raised and graduated according to the amount of the individual or corporate wealth could be constitutionally enacted. And if a progressive income tax can be enacted, the graduated inheritance tax can also be enacted, for the principle is practically the same. Senator David B. Hill, of New York, has called the progressive tax a “modern fad.” It is so modern, however that it can be traced back to the Romans, Greeks, and Egyptians. During the palmiest days of Greece—the days of Solon and Lycurgus—a progressive tax was a stern reality.

Our own country has not been without a progressive tax. In 1797 a graded inheritance tax was levied by Congress. This law was repealed in 1802. In 1862 a similar law was passed. But after having been decided to be constitutional by the Supreme Court, it was repealed in 1872.

Other governments at the present time tax the rich. In England, besides the income tax, many other items of revenue are contributed entirely by the rich—contributed upon the principle that those who have acquired riches shall bear the burden of taxation. In the United States we seem to place the burden of taxation upon the shoulders least fitted to bear it. Every effort to tax the rich, to properly tax corporations and trusts, has met with failure. The lobbyist and corporation lawyer have defied the tax-gatherer until they have worn out the patience of the people. The time is now ripe for proper legislation. A progressive income tax and a tax upon inheritances should be made a law in every State. The power to tax, it has been said, is the power to destroy. If a scale of taxation were wisely adopted it would eventually enable us to reach without political disturbance the almost total abolition of an aristocracy of wealth and thus solve the great problem of the day. If we are to consider humanity of any importance at all, wealth must be limited. The rights of all must be considered. When this is done we may be able to have a truly prosperous nation—a nation in which prosperity will not be confined to a favored few, but given to all.

“Prosperity,” says Rousseau, “is best secured when the medium-class income prevails, when no citizen is so rich that he can buy others, and no one so poor that he might be compelled to sell himself.”

THE BATTLE OF THE MONEY METALS

I. BIMETALLISM SIMPLIFIED.

BY GEORGE H. LEPPER.

The “free-silver delusion” is not dead, nor will it die unless the McKinley administration shall give it its quietus by providing the country with a sound and popular system of bimetallism. Even the most sanguine of the Republican leaders must admit that the prospect of accomplishing this task by international agreement is not so encouraging as to make the tentative consideration of other plans, not requiring concerted action, unnecessary or useless. The purpose of this article is to present such a plan, and to contrast it with those which have already been tried, or have thus far been proposed.

That the financial policy we have pursued since 1878, the year of the Bland-Allison Act, has been absurd and ruinous hardly admits of two opinions. Secretary Carlisle, in his letter of September 16th last, gave authoritative utterance to what had long been tacitly understood. He said, “If the time shall ever come when the parity of the present silver dollars and silver certificates cannot be otherwise maintained, they will be received by the government in exchange for gold.” In other words, the vast stores of silver purchased by the United States under the laws of 1878 and 1890 are a dead asset of the Treasury, and cannot be utilized for purposes of redemption until sixteen ounces of silver shall again be equivalent to one of gold, or until they are re-sold in the open market for gold. To render this treasure available for ultimate redemptions thus becomes a prime condition of our problem.

There is a growing disposition in certain influential quarters to evade the difficulties in the way of international bimetallism by taking the government out of the banking business, and relegating the matter of currency issues more and more to the banks. Whatever may be said in behalf of this course, it is certainly not popular with the masses, who, justly or ignorantly, have come to look upon national banks as favored objects of legislation, and in league with syndicates and trusts. But, aside from this, the real core of the trouble is not removed. We but shift the burden of responsibility. The ultimate fund for redemption remains limited to the one metal as beforehand can serve the banks even less efficiently, for the more divided the responsibility the larger the proportion of gold required for reserve purposes.

International bimetallism at the contemplated ratio of 16 to 1, and bimetallism by independent action at the same ratio, although opposing issues in the late campaign, are founded upon the same errors and misconceptions. Both assume that monetization creates a commercial demand for the metals, thereby enhancing their values; that the use of gold and silver as money substances has been one of choice with us instead of necessity; and that legal-tender laws create value.

It may be going too far to say that monetization creates no demand, but whatever demand it may be supposed to create is not a commercial one. In the latter sense the word signifies both an actual purchase, or the exchange of one thing for another, and a permanent withdrawal from the market of the thing bought. The act of coinage is certainly not a purchase, for, directly or indirectly, it aims to restore to the offerer of the bullion not something else, but the precise thing received; nor is the metal retired from the market, since it is actually or virtually, though in an altered form, immediately restored thereto. The whole process is merely one of bailment. It would therefore seem incumbent upon those affirming the efficacy of monetization to raise the price of the metal to show by scientific analysis just how, why, and to what extent it does so. The fact that from 1792 to 1873, with free coinage at a very close approximation to the market value, not once did the legal and commercial ratios coincide, and that the change of the former from 15 to 1 to 16 to 1 in 1834 had no perceptible effect on the market, seems to be conclusive proof that the general belief that free coinage at a fixed ratio appreciates the over-valued metal is delusive.

It is important to inquire into the grounds upon which the use of silver and gold is founded, for if we have chosen them for that purpose there is an implication that other substances might have served the same object almost, if not quite, as well. Such is not the case. Silver and gold are absolutely unique in possessing the qualities indispensable for money, and not only nature, but immemorial custom and deep-rooted prejudice combine to compel their use in the exchanges irrespective, and even despite, of legislation. Monetization, therefore, cannot, for this further reason, add to, or take away from, their respective values, because the exchangeability that monetization is supposed to give them is a natural quality and not the creature of law. But so much more is this true of gold than of silver, that the dependence of modern commerce, and, through it, modern civilization, upon it is almost absolute. If, therefore, free coinage at a ratio unfair to gold were attempted, gold would cease to be offered at the mints, but it would nevertheless continue in use in final settlements, especially in transactions of some magnitude, thus preventing its decline in value.

Suppose, then, that such a law, national or international, should go into effect to-day, would anyone be so fatuous as to part with his gold until the effect of the law could be discerned? If the governments at the same time should exercise the same good sense, they would retain their gold and disburse their silver, but such conduct would defeat the very object of the law. If, on the other hand, they should release their gold, retaining their silver, they would give fresh point to the oft-proved saying, “The fool and his money are soon parted.” A bona-fide attempt on the part of one or more powers to change the market ratio of the metals could result only in transferring government gold to private coffers, and in a general fall to the silver basis with all its attendant evils. Meanwhile the gold would continue its functions as money in new transactions, but at its market value, never by any chance reaching the public treasuries except on the same basis. The inconvenience of transacting business with a metal some thirty times as heavy, value for value, as that to which they had been accustomed would, without further reason, speedily induce the governments to a restoration of the gold standard at any cost.

As for the legal-tender quality, it cannot be denied that governments here possess a peculiar power which individuals cannot exert; but that fact does not make the exercise of that power morally right. The quality of legal tender infused into the debased dollar cannot but add temporarily to its exchangeable value in a degree gradually diminishing with the exhaustion of the accumulated credits. When, however, the last debtor in the series is reached, and there is no longer a Peter to rob for the sake of Paul, the fraudulent coin must inevitably sink to the value it had as bullion prior to the act that created it.

Upon such fallacies as these it is sought to erect the elaborate superstructure of the civilized world’s monetary system! Some of the more advanced thinkers among the self-styled bimetallists, realizing that some deference must be paid to the lessons of experience, which offers not a solitary instance of the concurrent use of the two metals under a fixed ratio, argue that, even so, the chief blessing of bimetallism—a less variable standard—will have been secured in the automatic oscillation from one circulation to the other. If this oscillatory feature is the object sought, the adoption of a ratio of 16 to 1, or thereabouts, would certainly not secure it, but one almost identical with the market ratio would be imperative. Not once in the history of our country did this alternation occur, although from 1792 to 1873 we were upon the double standard. It is true that in 1834 the circulation changed from silver to gold, but that was due not to the automatic effect of that system, but to an actual change of the legal ratio from 15 to 1 to 16 to 1. But if the legal ratio is now made to conform to the market one, what becomes of our present silver coins? Must they be called in and be replaced by the new? If so the convenience of our subsidiary coinage will be sacrificed, for a silver dollar twice its present size would be intolerable.

The obstacles in the way of international bimetallism need not be enumerated here. The proceedings at the Brussels monetary conference in 1892, though they accomplished little besides, certainly served to make these difficulties plain. The primary object is to make silver coins and gold coins continuously interchangeable in trade at a ratio approximating as closely as possible to 16 to 1, and the discussion of the means to accomplish this has apparently narrowed down to one proposition to be answered by a simple yes or no: Shall the free coinage of gold and silver at the ratio of 1 to 16 be restored? It will not do to insert any other ratio (except, perhaps, 1 to 15 or 1 to 15½), because if a ratio closely approximating the commercial one is contemplated, each nation might decide the question for itself, and an international agreement would be superfluous. All the civilized nations have their own established ratios of coinage varying from 15 to 15½ or 16 of silver to 1 of gold, and whichever of these should prevail the result could not but be a serious matter to those nations obliged to reform their coinage in accordance therewith. Neither horn of the dilemma presented by the plan of a fixed ratio is practicable; the convenient one of 16 to 1 is impossible, and the commercial one would necessitate recoinages and make the coins prohibitively cumbrous. The choice of an intermediate ratio would be a virtual relinquishment of the principle itself, for how would that ratio be arrived at if not by mere guess? There are no data to guide us, nor is there any formulated rule by which the desired ratio may be determined. Besides, the intermediate ratio would still remain open to the objections advanced against the higher ratio, both in requiring recoinage and in unduly enlarging the coins.

The inevitable result of free coinage at a fixed ratio is to expel the undervalued metal from circulation. There can be but one way to prevent this, and that is by a system of sliding scale whereby scrupulous fidelity to the state of the market from day to day may be preserved. Diurnal recoinages are of course out of the question, but the thing is nevertheless both easy and practicable.

Let us assume that gold only has hitherto been used as money, that 25.8 grains thereof have been taken to be one dollar, and that it is now desired to supplement it with the use of silver. Our proposition will necessarily take this form: If one dollar is equal to 25.8 grains of gold, it must be equal to as many grains of silver as 25.8 grains of gold will buy in the open market. Here we must remember that what is true to-day may not be true to-morrow or a year hence. So many grains of gold may to-day be worth 412½ grains of silver, to-morrow they may be worth but 400, and next day, 420. By fixing the amount of silver in the dollar we thus utter through these coins a new falsehood each day. Constant values, not constant weights, is what we are driving at; so in lieu of the silver coin we must substitute a promise to pay a gold dollar, or a gold dollar’s worth of silver, whatever the state of the market. This is what I designate natural bimetallism. The silver dollar and fractional pieces as we now have them may nevertheless continue in circulation, for the promise can be written into them by legislation to redeem them, upon surrender, in the same manner as the paper promises. It is possible that Hamilton and his successors in office prior to 1837 may have thought of this expedient, but discarded it as not then feasible. We must remember, however, that they had serious practical difficulties to contend with, which are now happily removed. The advantages of the telegraph, the cable, the improved means of transportation, and our admirable system of market quotations, enable us now with certainty and ease to determine daily what any given thing is worth in terms of any other.

In order to make my plan as clear as possible, I shall run the risk of seeming elementary by following through, step by step, a typical transaction under it: Let us fancy that the reader, bearing a nugget of gold in his left hand and another of silver in his right, and desiring to convert them into money, repairs to the Philadelphia mint. He applies there to the proper clerk, who, for simplicity’s sake, we will suppose performs all the operations. The clerk weighs and assays the two pieces of metal, and finds the gold one to contain 25,800 grains of standard gold, worth precisely $1,000, which are counted out in bills. A similar operation reveals that the lump of silver weighs 35,500 grains, but the clerk is now observed to consult a table before saying, “The market equivalent of a gold dollar is to-day 710 grains, consequently your 35,500 grains are worth $50;” and he then proceeds to count out the money in bills precisely like those given in payment for the gold. Upon examining these at his leisure the reader discovers imprinted thereon a contract running as follows: “This note entitles the bearer on demand to [the denomination of the bill] dollars in gold or to the market equivalent thereof in silver.”

In the course of time, say five years hence, these identical notes, by the accidents of trade, have come into my hands, and I desire to have them redeemed. Applying to the United States Treasury I find I am granted the privilege of taking payment in silver, in gold, or partly in one and the balance in the other. For the purposes of our illustration, however, we will adhere to the figures already used. In exchange for the $1,000, then, I receive back precisely the weight of gold originally given for them. For the $50 I receive six pieces of silver of different sizes, which I notice are arranged upon a decimal scale of grains. They contain respectively 30,000, 5,000, 1,000, 500, 100, and 50 grains; in all 36,650 grains, or 1,150 grains in excess of the original quantity. Upon inquiry I learn that this excess is not due to any mistake by the clerk, but that since the first transaction silver has fallen so that 733 grains are now commercially equal to 25.8 grains of gold, and that the government has simply redeemed my notes at par. After this first experience I have many subsequent transactions with the mint and with the Treasury. At the former I find that I have the choice of notes, gold coin, or silver coin. At first I reject the silver coins as being under weight, but upon its being explained that they are purposely made light for the sake of convenience, and that they are by general law redeemable in the same manner as the notes, I no longer object to them. At the Treasury, on the other hand, I am sometimes, though rarely, informed that the government is exercising the option reserved in its contract; that it is paying exclusively in gold, or exclusively in silver, or partly in one and partly in the other. These occasional disappointments, however, never affect the integrity of the money I have in hand, for whether redeemed in gold or silver, everyone knows that it will be redeemed at its face value, and it accordingly passes unquestioned.

Upon several occasions I present bonds of the government for redemption, some of them issued previous to the inauguration of the new system, and others issued afterward. In either case I find that the same system of redemption prevails as in the example of the notes. Treasury notes, silver coins, and silver certificates—one and all I discover are also redeemable like the new notes or convertible into them, so that I need never concern myself about any matter save their genuineness.

Gold certificates and greenbacks must, of course, be redeemed as their special contract requires, but, once redeemed, they must reissue in the new bimetallic notes which I have described. Thus a very simple method is provided whereby this form of currency may be transmuted into another without contracting the circulation.

The great desideratum is to make our vast stores of silver available for ultimate redemptions, and this, natural bimetallism effectually accomplishes. Our gold reserve would therefore cease to be indispensable to the preservation of our national credit just as soon as the greenbacks and gold certificates were converted into the bimetallic notes or cancelled. But there need be no fear that the gold reserve would ever become depleted. By removing all danger of the debasement of our money, by insuring the parity of every dollar of our currency with gold, and by permanently retiring the greenbacks, we destroy the incentive to hoard gold, cause its return to the reserve, relieve it of half the burden it formerly had to sustain, and reduce to a minimum the tendency to withdrawals. The copious supply of gold thus secured would enable the Treasurer to waive his option to pay in silver whenever the customer preferred gold, thereby enabling merchants to use the less cumbrous metal for foreign shipments. Indeed, it is entirely probable that the new notes would be preferred to gold in international as well as in domestic exchanges.

An advantage of especial importance is that the metals can be concurrently used. The oscillation from one to the other, even if it be admitted that it would provide us always with the better of them under whatever changes may occur, is certainly not to be preferred to the constant and equal use of both. The unlimited coinage of the two metals upon a plan so equitable, recognizing as it does their precise market relations from day to day, would enable us to view with indifference the fluctuations of the market, however great, and to whatever cause due. Incidental to this advantage, and second only to it in importance, would be the establishment of a par of exchange simultaneously with the gold-and with the silver-using countries by allowing customs duties to be paid in silver bullion at market prices, or in gold.

It may be contended that under the plan here proposed the government might lose by a continued decline in silver, and that the silver it already has would remain depreciated far below the price the government paid for it. I frankly admit this. But is it reasonable to suppose that silver will continue to decline? The probabilities are that in the succeeding twenty years the production of gold will increase more rapidly in proportion than silver; and it also seems that whereas processes for extracting and refining silver have well-nigh reached their limit of economy, the new processes for treating gold are rapidly improving. Nor must it be forgotten that should such a decline occur the mint deposits are from day to day keeping pace with the withdrawals, the losses on the latter thus being counterbalanced by concurrent gains, and interest-bearing debts being constantly transmuted into non-interest bearing currency. It is equally clear that the utilization of a dead asset, as the government stock of silver now is, is a distinct gain, and will permanently dispense with the future issue of bonds for the repletion of the gold reserve. As for the silver purchased by the government under the Acts of 1878 and 1890 having become depreciated, the fact is there whether we choose to recognize or ignore it. There is no better way for palliating that loss than to make that silver immediately available for the payment of the nation’s debts.

Allied to the question of the costliness of the system is that of its tendency toward, or freedom from, speculative disturbances. So long as payment solely in gold was compulsory, speculators had a fertile field for their operations. By giving the Treasurer the option of payment in silver or gold, however, raids upon either metal can be met by paying exclusively in the other until the proper equilibrium is restored. If a real difficulty should still be found to exist in practice, a slight mint charge would effectually put an end to it. In any event, natural bimetallism is much less open to criticism on this score than the existing system, or than that of the fixed ratio.

The pieces of silver with which redemptions are to be made are in no sense to be regarded as money. They are distinctly merchandise, possessing a commercial value precisely equivalent to the number of money units received or surrendered therefor, and when the notes have been redeemed, and the commercial equivalent has been given therefor, the government’s responsibility ends. The government assumes no obligation to maintain silver bullion at a given ratio to gold, but it does assume to make each unit of money the equal of 25.8 grains of gold. In other words, the fluctuations in the value of silver are confined to it in its bullion shape, and cannot enter into its form as money. The idea that paper currency must be redeemed in gold, as money, or silver, as money, is erroneous. It is redeemed in those metals because they have value as merchandise. In domestic transactions this fact is often lost sight of, but it becomes manifest in international exchanges when the metallic money passes strictly on its merits as bullion, and without regard to the stamp it bears. For these reasons the Treasury should not be understood as guaranteeing the weight or fineness of the metal, except in its immediate transactions, although to facilitate its ready acceptance between reputable merchants, the affixing of the government’s seal upon the pieces would be a very proper practice.

Nor is there any mechanical difficulty in the way of the operation of the plan. The silver could be fashioned into pieces of different sizes graduated upon a decimal scale of grains, with the smallest piece containing fifty grains, being somewhat larger than the current dime. By limiting redemptions, then, to fifty dollars and multiples thereof, our pieces will in every conceivable instance enable us to make the exchange, or redemption, to the accuracy of a single grain on each dollar, which is certainly sufficiently close for all practical purposes.

In contrast to the national banking system, the bonds could be retired without derangement to our finances, the metals forming a basis upon which our outstanding currency could directly rest—thus obviating the extravagant features of that system and stripping us of the impediment of an immense debt. And not only this: the encouragement natural bimetallism would hold out to owners of bullion of both kinds would cause our national vaults to be filled to overflowing with the sinews of war, and make us the best equipped nation on the earth for a prolonged struggle, should such a struggle come.

By providing a means for the remonetization of silver at the market rate we are doing its friends a greater kindness than they ask. Free coinage on seemingly more favorable terms would result in immediate overproduction and a glutted market, from which condition it would be most difficult to escape. If there be any merit in the contention that a “demand” for the metal is what is needed, and that that demand will enhance its price, so much the better, for in that case not only will the condition of the silver industry improve, but the government itself will be benefited by the enhancement in the value of the metal it already holds and may hereafter acquire. The example set by the United States would be gladly imitated by other nations, and the use of silver as a basis for money would speedily rival that of gold.

Viewed as an experiment the trial of it would be inexpensive and without peril, while congressional debates pending its consideration would give no cause for apprehension or disturbance to business, since the gold standard would not be jeopardized. But why should it be regarded as experimental when the most elementary and most familiar business principles are followed?

The question may be raised whether the preservation of the gold standard is desirable, since, it is claimed, it is gradually appreciating in value. To this it may be said that the peril of the gold standard does not consist in the fact that it is rising, but that it has been hitherto accompanied by the non-use of silver in final redemptions. That an appreciating dollar is necessarily an evil is, moreover, fairly debatable. During the period from 1864-1872 (which our Democratic friends delight to laud as the most prosperous in our history), although we were nominally on a bimetallic basis, contracts were made on that of the greenback, which rose during that time an average of ten per cent per annum, to wit: from 49.2 cents in 1864, to 89 cents in 1872. In other words the debtor who borrowed $492.00 in 1864 was obliged, eight years later, to pay his creditor $890.00 of like purchasing power as he had received, in addition to a considerably higher interest than now current. I do not wish to be considered as standing sponsor for the rising dollar, but it is a pertinent question to ask those who decry the gold standard for this reason, why the same cause did not have the same effect in each instance.

The objection may be made that I would make of a silver mere commodity, but the point is not well taken, inasmuch as the mint offerings are transmuted into paper currency, which is virtually making silver, money; moreover, the silver itself is retained in its present form of subsidiary coinage. Silver is not a moral being possessed of rights and sensitive to insults; it is a mere thing whose function it is to serve us in any way we may deem most conducive to our interests. If under the system of natural bimetallism it does this best, the question as to its money or commodity character is vain. Moreover, under Gresham’s law, one metal under the fixed ratio is not only “reduced to a commodity,” but is absolutely expelled from circulation and as a basis for circulation; and we have also seen that in the last analysis both silver and gold are commodities under any system of specie payments.

Under a republican form of government, where frequent and extreme changes from one policy to another must be guarded against, that policy should be adopted which most nearly conforms to justice, and which the sense of the largest majority commends. What proposition, then, could be fairer and more apt to commend itself to the general intelligence than that the metals should be monetized at their commercial values from day to day, or what policy more likely to remain unaffected by the mutations of parties and politics?

In conclusion let me sum up the salient points: We have seen (1) that the chief weakness of the present system is the non-availability of silver for final redemptions; (2) that “currency reform” is inadequate because of its unpopularity and in failing to increase the primary basis of money by the addition of silver; and (3) that the principle of the fixed ratio is fallacious and impracticable. On the other hand, we have discovered Natural Bimetallism to be the application of the principles of everyday business to that business which underlies all others,—national finance,—and that the advantages resulting therefrom are: It dispenses with the necessity of an international agreement with its attendant uncertainties, perils, and delays, and at the same time points out the way to a sound and permanent home policy upon which all our factions could unite. It practically restores to silver its unlimited coinage at its just market rate, injects a healthy stimulus into the languishing silver industry, preserves our admirable system of subsidiary coinage, and utilizes both metals as companion pillars of our national credit. It coaxes gold to the mint, keeps it there, and does away permanently with bond issues. It provides for the retirement of the greenbacks, supplies their place with currency equally sound but less hazardous, and insures the absolute parity of every dollar in circulation with every other, and with gold. In fine, as every true principle must, and as only a true principle can, it answers every condition of the problem to which it applies, and commends itself as the best, if not the only, way out of our financial embarrassments.

II. BIMETALLISM EXTINGUISHED.

BY JOHN CLARK RIDPATH.

The article on “Bimetallism Simplified” by Mr. George H. Lepper is open to one serious criticism: the title should be changed to “Bimetallism Extinguished;” for, when the argument is translated out of its sophistical form, that is its precise meaning. We are obliged, in such a matter as this—even at the expense of courtesy—to break through the thin film of plausibility, and at one stroke to lay bare what is in the bottom.

It is a marvellous thing that they who engage in excogitating this kind of double-meaning literature about bimetallism, should suppose that the people can any longer be deluded with it. The agents of the money-power and the fuglemen of the dominant political party seem to think that a certain species of casuistry and complicated makeshift of argument can still be forced into currency, as it has been in the past, and that the great American democracy can be persuaded thereby to accept fallacy for truth and thus to perpetuate the reigning Dynasty of Robbers. Messieurs, you can perform this feat no longer.

Mr. Lepper admits in the outset that the McKinley administration is doomed unless it can provide the country with a sound and popular system of bimetallism. As a matter of fact, a sound system of bimetallism is simply bimetallism. A popular system of bimetallism is simply bimetallism—neither more nor less. In this vital matter, the popularity will take care of itself, and so will the soundness.

In the next place, we observe that if the McKinley administration depends upon the adoption by it of any system of bimetallism, then the administration is doomed, deeply and darkly doomed, already. Let the world know that the McKinley administration will not provide, and has never intended to provide, the country with any kind of bimetallism. The administration has no notion of such a thing. It was not created for such a useful and honorable destiny. It was created to prevent bimetallism by treacherously pretending to be in favor of it. They who created the administration, they who determine and will continue to determine its action, openly sneer at any system of money except the gold-based system of monometallism.

Mr. Lepper must be aware of this fact. Indeed it is to be hoped that there is not any longer one man in the United States so far gone down the slopes of delusion and idiotic infatuation as to imagine that the hollow pretensions of this administration in the direction of bimetallism by international agreement, or by any other method, have ever been anything else than cunning subterfuge and treachery.

The politicians who worked out the St. Louis platform knew what they were about. They knew that they were creating a hypocritical document with which to deceive and ensnare the American people. They fixed their net and made their haul. They succeeded to this extent—that they elected their ticket and gained possession of the government. Lo, the day of judgment has already come! Now, in the endeavor to postpone the judgment, they prepare arguments under captions that have a friendly sound but are at bottom bitterer than cassia and more mockful than the laughter of Mephistopheles.

The next stage in the policy of these gentlemen is to invent something that shall seem to be bimetallism, but is not. This something they seek to palm off on the world and to distract mankind with it until the money sharks who are chuckling behind the gold-vaults of two continents shall be enabled, in the confusion and mêlée, to shuffle off to covert with their incalculable loads of booty.

Mr. Lepper’s paper is a document of the kind described. The general purport of it is this: “People of the United States, I am a physician. I belong to the silver school. I am a graduate of the Bimetallic Institute. This pill which I give you is out of the silver pharmacopœia. It will heal all your diseases perfectly.” But when you examine the pill which he exhibits, you will find it to be a solid bolus of gold, filmed over with tin foil.

Mr. Lepper enters upon the discussion of the subject with the following statement: “The vast stores of silver purchased by the United States under the laws of 1878 and 1890 are a dead asset of the Treasury, and cannot be utilized for purposes of redemption until sixteen ounces of silver shall again be equivalent to one of gold.” Observe what becomes of these propositions under a truthful analysis. In the first place, our “vast stores of silver” are not vast stores. They are not nearly as vast as they ought to be. There are no bursting vaults of silver in the Treasury of the United States and never were. In the next place the stores of silver are not a dead asset of the Treasury. They are just as much a living asset of the Treasury as is the accumulation of gold therein—and in the same sense. These stores cannot be used for purposes of redemption because they do not exist for that purpose. A bimetallist who is not a bimetallist is always strong on redemption; and he knows only one redeemer—gold. The redeeming business in our financial plan of salvation has been altogether overdone. In the name of wonder, what is it we want to redeem? Is it the greenbacks? Is it any of our legal tender? The greenback is already constitutional money. Does Mr. Lepper know that the greenback has been declared constitutional money by the Supreme Court of the United States—this with only a single dissenting vote? Does he know that every national bank bill in the United States is finally redeemable in greenbacks? Does he know that in our scheme of redemption, the people have only a paper redeemer, while the banks, with the connivance of the government, have a redeemer of gold? Our “vast stores of silver” have only to be coined into silver dollars; to be used as primary money, just as gold is used; to be paid out just as gold is paid out in the transaction of national business, and in particular in the payment of the national indebtedness. If this is freely done, the exaggerated purchasing power of the latter metal would at once be reduced to the normal standard. This reduction would immediately express itself, or begin to express itself, in a general rise of prices, in a revival of business, and in a universal restoration of prosperity. Everything would again be well in the great Republic. All this would happen without financial sin and without a redeemer.

Mr. Lepper very properly says that international bimetallism and independent bimetallism “are founded upon the same errors and misconceptions.” He should have said that they are founded upon the same truths and necessities. For “errors,” read truths, and for “misconceptions” read necessities. The writer of “Bimetallism Simplified” next goes on to say that whatever value may be created by monetization is not a commercial value. Well, then, what kind of value is it? Is it a social value, such as a man attributes to his child that is not for sale? Or is it a political value, such as a party manager attributes to a vote that is for sale?

Let us see whether monetization does, or does not, create value. We will not quibble about the phrase “commercial value,” but come directly to the issue of value in general. Take the case upon which the goldites so greatly rely, that of the safe burned in a fire with a bag of gold coin and a bag of silver coin fused within. The triumphant gold sophist says, “The ten gold dollars fused into a lump will still be worth just ten dollars, while the silver dollars fused into a lump will be worth only five dollars.” Of course the lump of fused gold will be worth ten dollars when it is coined and measured by itself! Suppose that the lump of fused silver be coined into dollars again; how much will that be worth? Everybody who has a premonitory symptom of common sense knows that the lump of fused silver will—if coinable again into dollars—be worth just as much as the lump of fused gold. It is because the lump of fused gold is coinable again into dollars that it retains its value. It is because the lump of fused silver is not coinable again, under the present order, that it is not worth ten dollars.

What makes the difference? It is the fact of monetization for one of the metals, and demonetization for the other. Does anybody suppose that ten dollars of silver fused into a lump would not still be worth ten dollars if the lump were re-coinable? Does anybody suppose that ten gold dollars fused into a lump would still be worth ten dollars if the lump were not re-coinable? The fact of monetization not only confirms the value of one metal, but it insures the value of the other also—that is, it would insure it if monetization were not denied. Incidentally, this plain statement of the case utterly confutes the only seemingly valid argument, that is the two-bag argument, with which the goldites have been able to support their theory of “sound” money. Mr. Lepper’s assertion that monetization does not confer commercial value will have to rise through many circles in the spiral of intelligence before it reaches the plane of nonsense.

Further on in his paper, Mr. Lepper says: “The inevitable result of free coinage at a fixed ratio, is to expel the undervalued metal from circulation.” Who taught him that? Perhaps Gresham taught him. If so, he taught him what is not true. It is incredible that intelligent people should be humbugged with such a fallacious proposition as Gresham’s so-called “law.” Suppose that under free coinage, gold be undervalued, and suppose that, being so, it begins to vanish—where will it go to? To the Bank of England? If so, what will be the effect on the price of gold in the Bank of England? Will not the price begin to fall at that point at which the stream of gold pours out? And will it not continue to fall as long as the outflow goes on? What, on the other hand, will be the effect on the money market at that point from which the outflow is established? Will there not be produced a stringency behind the outflow, and will not all kinds of money begin to appreciate at that point from which the flow begins? And will not this stringency become greater and greater as long as the outflow continues? And will not the prices of all kinds of money, silver in particular, begin to rise until the outflow ceases? This is to say that the price of gold, like the price of anything else whatsoever, will fall wherever it accumulates, and the price of silver will rise in every place from which the gold is drained away, until a parity of values between the two money metals shall be inevitably established. This is the real law of two money metals circulating together; and Gresham’s so-called “law” is only the hocus-pocus and ghost of a law that is true to begin with, and is not true to end with.

I now come to the gist of Mr. Lepper’s article, and I invite particular attention to the heart and core of the matter as he presents it. He says (all the while declaring himself to be a bimetallist): “Let us assume that gold only has hitherto been used as money, that 25.8 grains thereof have been taken to be one dollar, and that it is now desired to supplement it with the use of silver.” I had not supposed that any person in the world could be under the influence of a delusion to the extent of propounding three such hypotheses as the foregoing. Mr. Lepper might with equally good reason, in discussing the constitution of nature, have said, “Let us assume that the world is a circular disk of tin,” or rather, “Let us assume that the world has always been regarded as a circular disk of tin. Let us assume that the world, being a circular disk of tin, weighs 3,820 lbs., and that it is now desired to improve its constitution by adding forty pounds to its weight and by converting it into a square block.” These propositions would be just as philosophical, just as useful in argument, and just as well warranted as those which he presents! His assumption is that gold only has been used as money. But it is not true that gold only has been used as money. It is not true that gold principally has been used as money. It is not true that gold has been as widely used as silver. It is not true that it is as universally used to-day as silver. It is not true that it was used at as early a day as was silver. It is not true that it has been used as a standard unit of money and account in the United States as long and as universally as silver has been used. It is therefore absurd to say, “Let us assume that gold only has been used as money.” It is preposterous to offer such a hypothesis. If we should grant the affirmative of such an assertion, we should rush into a region of falsehood and fanaticism identical in all particulars with that station which the goldites now occupy, and from which they send forth their clamor.

Mr. Lepper says further: “Let us assume that 25.8 grains hitherto have been taken to be one dollar.” But it is not true that 25.8 grains of gold have hitherto in our American system been taken to be one dollar. It is true that, according to our fundamental statute, and to all subsequent statutes down to the year 1873, 25.8 grains of gold were taken to be of the value of a dollar; but they were not a dollar. Our gold eagles were of the value of ten dollars; our half eagles were of the value of five dollars; our double eagles were of the value of twenty dollars; our quarter eagles were of the value of two and one-half dollars; our one-dollar gold piece, of 1849, was not one dollar, but was of the value of a dollar! The dollar was first, last, and all the time, defined to be a coin composed of 371 ¼ grains of pure silver. This is the very alphabet of the matter. I have myself set forth these facts so many times that I am ashamed to repeat them; for it implies that there are still people in the United States so lacking in intelligence and information as to require the reiteration of the bottom facts and principles in our American coinage system.

Twenty-five and eight-tenths grains of gold never did compose a dollar in the United States until after the year 1873. Why, therefore, should Mr. Lepper say, “Let us assume that 25.8 grains of gold have been taken to be one dollar”? Then he goes on to say, “Let us assume that it is desired to supplement it [that is the gold dollar] with silver.” Why should he speak of supplementing the use of gold with silver, any more than supplementing the use of silver with gold? There is not as good reason for the proposition to supplement gold with silver as there is to supplement silver with gold. Herein lies the trouble with those gentlemen who are trying to fix up a plan by which not to do it. They begin with a series of false hypotheses. They work along from these false assumptions until they reach some monstrous conclusion, and then show how sound the conclusion is because it is logical!

Genuine bimetallists do no such thing. They claim the coinage of gold and silver on terms of absolute equality. They do not propose to measure the silver by the gold, or the gold by the silver. They propose to have two standard units, and to use the one unit or the other unit at the option of the debtor. They do not propose that the creditor shall decide in which of these money metals a debt shall be paid or a contract made valid—simply for the reason that the two units co-exist, and every contract and engagement made among men is made in the face of this fact, and with the full knowledge of it, and with the understanding of what it implies. That understanding is that at the date of settlement, the debtor, and not the creditor, shall decide in which of the two standard metal-moneys he shall discharge his obligation. The option is his—exclusively his. The transaction is honorable, right, and just. Whoever challenges it is an abettor of the scheme for robbing the debtor by compelling him to transact his business, and in particular to pay his debts, according to a standard unit differing from the dollar of the law and the contract.

Of this outrageous fraud we will have no more. We spew it out of our mouths. We spit on the proposition, under whatever garb it comes, to compel the debtors of this nation to discharge their obligations in a dollar differing from the dollar of the law and the contract. We do not propose to “supplement” gold money with silver money—meaning the subordination of the silver to the gold. We do not propose to “supplement” silver money with gold money—meaning that the gold shall be absolute and the silver only token. There is no “supplement” about it. It is a simple proposition to have our money in two kinds, and not in one kind. It is like laying a foundation of stone and brick. The stone is not more dependent on the brick than the brick is dependent on the stone. They are both built into one abutment; they both contribute alike to its solidity and magnitude; they both enter into its composition and are part of its structure; and they both shall stay there, gentlemen of the gold craft, in spite of your efforts to take one constituent part of the abutment away!

I now come to the next essential division of Mr. Lepper’s article. I call particular attention to what he proposes. He says:

“In order to make my plan as clear as possible, I shall run the risk of seeming elementary by running through, step by step, a typical transaction under it: Let us fancy that the reader, bearing a nugget of gold in his left hand and another of silver in his right, and desiring to convert them into money, repairs to the Philadelphia mint. He applies there to the proper clerk, who, for simplicity’s sake, we will suppose performs all the operations. The clerk weighs and assays the two pieces of metal, and finds the gold one to contain 25,800 grains of standard gold, worth precisely $1,000, which are counted out in bills. A similar operation reveals that the lump of silver weighs 35,500 grains, but the clerk is observed to consult a table before saying: ‘The market equivalent of a gold dollar is to-day 710 grains; consequently your 35,500 grains are worth $50;’ and he then proceeds to count out the money in bills precisely like those given in payment for the gold. Upon examining these at his leisure, the reader discovers imprinted thereon a contract running as follows: ‘This note entitles the bearer on demand to [the denomination of the bill] dollars in gold or to the market equivalent thereof in silver.’”

This paragraph needs only to be critically examined in order to show forth the material of which it is builded. Mr. Lepper takes his two nuggets, the one of gold and the other of silver. He goes to the mint. The gold nugget weighs 25,800 grains; the silver nugget weighs 35,500 grains. Mr. Lepper adroitly slips in the clause that the gold nugget is “worth precisely a thousand dollars!” In what units is the gold nugget worth a thousand dollars? Why, in gold units. He says that the 35,500 grains of silver are found to be worth $50. In what units is that amount of silver worth $50? Why, in gold units! That is, beginning with the gold standard, and ignoring the silver standard, Mr. Lepper reaches bimetallism! That is good. He assumes, to begin with, the thing he is trying to prove! He assumes it in his major premise, implies it in his minor premise, and reaches it in his conclusion. I say that is very good. Twenty-five thousand eight hundred grains of gold are “worth precisely $1,000,” in gold dollars at the rate of 25.8 grains to the dollar. Well, I should say so. The same would be true of tin, of leather, or tree-molasses. Only assume that something is a standard, and then measure that something by itself and you will get there. Mr. Lepper gets there. Then again he assumes that the market equivalent of the gold dollar at the date referred to, is 710 grains of silver; therefore, 35,500 grains of silver are worth just $50 in gold. Forsooth, it requires a philosopher to tell us that; though a country schoolboy might make it out just as well. It is only a problem in the rule of three. We assume that silver is worth so much in gold; therefore, so much silver will be worth so much in gold! That is, gold is the standard; but we are a bimetallist, and we will write a paper on “Bimetallism Simplified” showing how we can create a mono-bimetallic standard. The “mono” is the essence of Mr. Lepper’s scheme; the bimetallic part of it is sophism and green cheese.

In his argument Mr. Lepper simply proposes to measure gold by itself; and to measure silver by gold! That is all there is in it. He seems not to know that anything measured by anything other than itself is not primary money, and cannot be. Gold, when coined and made legal tender, is primary money when measured by itself. Silver when coined and made a legal tender is also primary money when measured by itself. Anything coined and made a legal tender is primary money when measured by itself.

It is thus that Mr. Lepper creates a bimetallic system of money. He proposes to keep it up in the same manner. He simply assumes that gold is an unfluctuating, eternal standard, and that silver is a fluctuating, impossible standard. He agrees that silver may be used as money and even coined on a basis which assumes that it shall not be used as money and not be coined at all, except by the measure of gold! His factitious and absurd device is therefore not bimetallism, but monometallism on a basis of gold. He might substitute pewter for silver in his scheme, and it would be just as good; he might substitute putty or plaster of paris, and his plan would work as well.

Such a scheme is not bimetallism at all. It is monometallism pure and simple. I have, in a private way, pointed out the fact to Mr. Lepper that his plan is not what it pretends to be. I have tried to show him that what he proposes is simply a delusion of goldite hocus-pocus. As a matter of fact, The Arena has not the space to be devoted to the dissemination of such literature as Mr. Lepper’s article. I did not wish to subject the writer of “Bimetallism Simplified” to this castigation, but he would have it so. It is no doubt an entertaining business with Mr. Lepper to work his elaborate scheme for pretending to do a thing, and not doing it. Practically, I might urge upon his attention the fact that what he proposes will satisfy nobody; certainly it will not satisfy the McKinley administration. That administration does not propose to do anything. It proposes to stand still, in the midst of much bluster, hoping all the time that the gold standard will become more and more fixed on the American people, and that the “silver delusion” will subside.

Mr. Lepper will have his labor for his pains. His system will be laughed to scorn by all the goldites proper, and it is certainly rejected as spurious, impossible, and absurd by all genuine bimetallists. I wish to remark in this case, that the term “goldite” applied to the monometallist, is not a misnomer or an unwarranted epithet; for monometallists advocate the establishment of gold money only, as the primary money and money of ultimate redemption. On the other hand, the term “silverite” is a misnomer; if accepted, it misleads, for it implies that he who is characterized as a silverite is a believer in silver only as the primary money and money of ultimate redemption. There are no people of this class of whom we have heard.

Bimetallists believe in the use of both moneys freely and on terms of perfect equality; they will be satisfied with nothing less. They know that they are in the majority, and that they cannot be ultimately defrauded of their purpose. They intend to restore our coinage to what it was before the Act of 1873. By such restoration they propose to break the corner on gold and to reduce the exaggerated purchasing power of that metal to the normal standard. They intend that this reduction in the purchasing power of gold shall be answered—as they know it will be—with a corresponding rise in the prices of all the products of labor. They intend in this way to achieve prosperity; they intend to wrong no man—not even the bondholder; they intend that every man shall have his rights according to the law and the contract; they intend to break faith with none; they intend to march right on to the achievement of this result; in doing so, they intend to consult themselves. They know full well that the so-called “great commercial nations” will be glad enough to trade with us, and to take our money in both kinds too. If not, we hold the rod! If any nation under heaven proposes to discriminate against the United States of America because of our bimetallic standard of money, let that nation try it! We shall see who comes out best in that contest.

When the weak-kneed, the time-serving, and the cowardly shall be expelled from power; when American patriots are in the high places of authority; when the people’s voice shall be heard as the voice of many waters,—all men shall then be assured that the great republic is able to do its own business in its own way, asking favor of none, menacing none, and fearing none! When that good day comes with the end of the century, such literature as Mr. Lepper’s “Bimetallism Simplified,” read in the retrospect and in the light of a better verdict of the people, will seem to the thoughtful student of history to have been the product of some humorist, indulging a sarcastical disposition at the expense of the very theory which he sets forth in his article.

THE SEGREGATION AND PERMANENT ISOLATION OF CRIMINALS.

BY NORMAN ROBINSON.

What shall be done with confirmed and incorrigible offenders? For a good many thousand years the world has been wrestling with this problem, and in this year of grace it is seemingly very little nearer a rational solution than when the first fraternal brawl sent one brother into his grave, and another into exile with the perpetual brand of a murderer blazing upon his terror-stricken brow.

The savage settles the matter with a tomahawk or a war club. The remedy is at least effectual, and society in the kraal or the tepee does not bother its dusky brain about the possible reform of the offender. Any type of criminality that is inconvenient or unpopular is, therefore, summarily buried in the nearest grave.

Up to the time of the Christian era, the savage and the civilized man alike held substantially the same theories. The one idea that dominated all criminal law was punishment. The statutes of Draco and Lycurgus never harbored the thought of moral improvement, much less made provision for the reform of the criminal. Roman law and Greek law were little better. The one right which all offenders possessed was the right to be punished. Reformation was entirely a personal matter, which theoretically in rare instances was possible, to which the law, save in capital cases, interposed no special obstacles, and to which it gave no special encouragement.

With the advent of a new and more merciful dispensation, we find gradually creeping in a belief that the criminal classes have some rights which society is bound to respect, and that not the least important of these is the right to reform. For two thousand years these not necessarily conflicting ideas of reform and punishment have travelled down the centuries in a medley of incongruous and often contradictory systems of criminal law. As the better classes have generally made and administered the law, it is not strange that the elder and more savage idea has on the whole been dominant, and that, taking the world together, the reform of criminals is still rather a side issue than an object of far-reaching and systematic legislative enactment.

Even the most optimistic student of penology would be compelled to admit that our present methods of dealing with criminals are unsatisfactory to the last degree. Our systems of punishment do not punish in any such sense as to be a terror to evil-doers; our systems of reformation do not reform. The whole thing goes on in a vicious round of self-perpetuating infamy. The central idea of our modern penal system—and it is certainly a very venerable one—is that in some way the world will be greatly benefited by shutting up its law-breakers for a longer or shorter period, feeding them liberally, giving them a period of enforced steady habits and steady work, and after a while taking off this straight jacket of compulsory morality, and turning them loose again with improved criminal skill and sharpened appetites to prey upon society in the old way.

The actual result of this crowding of more or less confirmed vice into one concentrated aggregation, is simply to intensify the evil it was intended to remedy. The convict who enters a prison cell for the first time—perhaps as the result of some sudden and overpowering temptation—a man who at heart is no better and no worse than his neighbors, and who, if by any chance he had escaped conviction, would have finished his life as an average citizen, as a friend and advocate of the law—finds himself here in an entirely new environment. Self-respect is gone. The old motive for honesty is gone. He enters the new and stifling atmosphere of concentrated crime, and with it comes the feeling that the world is all against him. It is his first offence, but it is by no means likely to be his last. Every man he sees, save the grim rifle-carrying guard who growls and swears at him, is a convicted criminal. Every object that his eyes fall upon intensifies the lesson that he is henceforth to be counted among the enemies of his race. Every breath that he breathes reeks with the malaria of crime. He is now an enlisted soldier in a warfare against right and law and social order. He is in the devil’s own training school. The seven other “spirits more wicked than himself” are all around him. Whatever prison rules may say, there are certain to be clandestine meetings, secret conferences, in which the novice is initiated into the higher degrees of the freemasonry of crime. Schemes of profitable law-breaking swarm in the teeming brains of these wearers of the stripes, to be turned into actual deeds in “the good time coming,” when these apt pupils of the high school of depravity shall be free again to make war upon the peace and welfare of the world. Is it any wonder that this first offender comes out of prison a confirmed criminal, and that “the last state of that man is worse than the first”?

If the same business sense were used in this matter which is ordinarily given to the management of great human concerns, we should soon find some way of improving upon this discouraging condition of affairs. No merchant in his senses would discharge a dishonest clerk for a term of ninety days with the distinct understanding that he was to spend his enforced vacation in the society of thieves and cutthroats, and at the end of the time be taken back again into his old place as though nothing had happened. The railroad president who should discharge a drunken engineer, and then after six months give him hold of his old throttle again, although it was in evidence that he had spent his retirement in a whiskey saloon, studying under competent tuition the latest methods of holding up trains, would be very apt to be bundled off at the next meeting of the board of directors to manage railroads from the inside of a lunatic asylum. Courts and judges and lawyers are about the only people on the outside that do business in that way.

Is there no help for this state of things? Must the machinery of justice go on forever grinding over the same vile grist, retrying and reimprisoning old offenders, cultivating rather than repressing the law-breaking instinct, passing on to still lower depths of depravity the soul once caught in the meshes of crime, and at last dragging the great masses of offenders down to one common level of hopeless and helpless hostility to social order and law?

It is, of course, much easier to point out faults than to suggest effective remedies. I am persuaded that some happy inspiration of genius will yet give us methods, probably so simple that we shall wonder that they have not always been used, by which many of the gravest evils which disgrace our present system will be effectually removed. I think the key to the whole problem will ultimately be found in one word—segregation. Worcester defines “to segregate” “to gather in a flock, to set apart, to separate from others.”

In pursuance of this idea let us suppose, save in the case of certain crimes that disclose confirmed and hopelessly vicious tendencies, that all first offenders were counted in a class by themselves. For these reformatories should be built, in which a complete segregation of the various classes of law-breakers should be made, and that, too, with the same idea uppermost which prevails in modern hospital practice, that infectious cases should in all instances be especially isolated. Criminal infection is as real and morally quite as disastrous as is physically that of cholera or smallpox. So with this predominating idea of segregation; and with a wise discrimination which might be difficult in the beginning, but which experience would more or less perfectly supply, the various classes of first offenders should be separated into distinct and non-communicating families. Hard labor should here mean hard labor. Rigid discipline coupled with coarse but wholesome food should emphasize the fact that this was a place, not of comfortable leisure, but of reformatory punishment. At the same time such educational and moral influences as enlightened experience could supply should be brought continuously to bear, to give new aims, inspire new motives, and impart health, strength, and soundness to morally weak but not necessarily hopelessly criminal natures.

Under enlightened management, commitment to such reformatories might be made for an indefinite period, with the same limited discretion that the law now gives to courts of justice, to be dependent largely upon the behavior of the criminal, and to be determined not before, but after his term of imprisonment began. The superintendent and board of managers should, in that case, be clothed with large discretionary powers to dismiss, to detain, to place in higher or lower classes, as their best judgments should dictate, and as the actual and tried needs and progress of reform in each individual case might demand. The vast, costly, and architecturally imposing structures which are now denominated “reformatories,” and which in many cases might be much more appropriately labelled “failures,” if not discarded altogether, could be supplemented by simple and inexpensive structures, giving abundant room and light and air. With such conditions and surroundings, and under such a system intelligently administered, it is reasonable to believe that no small proportion of first offenders, who, under our present method, drift into the hopelessly, and it might in many cases be added, helplessly, criminal classes, would be restored to moral soundness and self-respecting citizenship.

But with the most efficient system of reformation which human wisdom could devise, there would still be a large contingent of incorrigible offenders, who, from hereditary taint, bad environment, or other causes, have cut themselves off from all retreat, burned the bridges behind them, and enlisted in a life warfare against human society and law. Most second offenders and those whose brutal past points to an irredeemable future should properly be classed as life criminals, and with these, society, while not forgetting “the quality of mercy,” should deal with firm hand and inexorable justice.

As our government is not so situated that penal colonies are practicable, walled villages might be built with all the safeguards which modern science and inventive skill can supply for the absolute and permanent isolation of these “life criminals.” In these penal villages, various grades and classes should be placed each by itself. Behind these never-opening gates, and under conditions that should relieve the world at once and forever of their presence, these avowed and unrepentant enemies of social and civil order should be compelled to “work out their own salvation.”

No great and costly prisons would be needed. Simple and inexpensive cottages, each with its separate plot of ground, with furniture and housekeeping arrangements on the most frugal scale, with absolute necessaries in food and clothing, at least for a time, would be required. The greatest possible liberty should be given to each individual convict. The industrious should be assured of the full benefit of their toil. Those who would not work, should find here the same penalties for idleness as obtain in the world they had left. Here might be gathered the whole round of industry—artisans, shops, manufacturers of all kinds, aided by every appliance of modern machinery. Schools, libraries, and even churches would by no means be excluded from this life-convict home. There is no reason why such a community of criminals might not ultimately become largely self-supporting and self-governing. They could have their own courts, their own lawyers, their own judges, their own system of penal law, and their own machinery for its enforcement.

To each small company of men there should be allotted a cottage, which they could call their own. As far as possible these men should be left to themselves. The outworking of social and economic laws under such conditions might sometimes be summary and savage, but it would ultimately be salutary. Though for a while, save as it was held back by the mailed hand of military power, crime might run riot, the instinct of self-preservation would at last assert itself. The murderer does not like to be murdered; the highway robber does not like to be robbed; all classes of criminals object to taking their own medicine; and so it would come about that, even out of elements the most incongruous and unpromising, some form of social order would finally be evolved. It is needless to say that the sexes should occupy separate villages. This in itself would cut off one very formidable source of new recruits for the army of crime. Indeed, it is hardly too much to predict that, if this plan of permanent segregation and isolation were carried out for even a single generation, crime would sensibly diminish, our overcrowded courts would be relieved, taxation be lessened, and the staggering shoulders of modern civilization be to some extent unburdened from one of the heaviest loads they are now condemned to bear. It may seem an ungenerous thing to say, but it is to be feared that the opposition to any such plans would be likely to come from those whose familiarity with the vices of the present system should best fit them to labor for and most earnestly to desire its improvement. Enlightened physicians gladly join in any scheme which promises to prevent or lessen disease, in spite of the fact that their living depends upon its prevalence. So, enlightened judges, lawyers, and court officers might be expected cordially to approve of any system of moral hygiene which gave promise of efficiency as a prophylactic against crime. It is to be feared, however, that there would be a numerically large contingent who, like “Demetrius the silversmith,” would feel that “this our craft is in danger,” and who openly or secretly would do their best, as they have in a hundred instances in the past, to prevent the lopping off of a single twig from that wide-spreading tree of evil, whose fruit brings little scruple and no small gain to the cunning craftsmen who manage the costly and complicated machinery of the courts.

If such a system as has been rudely outlined were made absolutely secure, and the power of pardoning boards removed or greatly restricted, it might be wise to abolish the death penalty altogether. Juries might then have fewer scruples, and acquittals upon technical grounds, in spite of plain and abundant evidence, become less frequent. Mob law feeds largely upon the belief that even the worst criminals stand in little danger of punishment, but that “by hook or by crook”—mostly “crook”—especially if they or their friends can command means to hire lawyers and invoke the dilatory machinery of the courts, they are almost certain to escape. Whatever, therefore, tends to render the punishment of crime more speedy and certain is a direct discouragement to these sudden and savage outbursts of popular indignation against crime.

In the classification of offenders and their assignment to different penal villages, there would, no doubt, be some so atrociously and fiendishly criminal that it would be a cruelty to others and a mistaken kindness to them to permit them ever to go beyond their present prison walls. By the plan suggested, the penitentiaries in most of the States, now so crowded, while being relieved of a large part of their present tenants, could still be utilized for the confinement of these pariahs of crime.

Of course, in the working out of the plan suggested, there is abundant room for all the skill and wisdom which past history and modern experience can supply. Whether this or some better method shall finally prevail depends on so many uncalculated and incalculable contingencies, that he would be a very venturesome prophet who should attempt to forecast the future. It does not, however, seem reasonable that, in all the upheavals of modern thought, the questioning of old methods, and the suggestions of new and better ones, which these final years of the century are bringing, the treatment of the criminal classes shall be the one question that defies solution, or that the new æon which is soon to open shall find us still bound to a system which is confessedly a failure. Is it too much to hope that we can greet the opening of the twentieth century with a lustrum of prison reform, which shall bring at once the noblest mercy to the criminal, combined with absolute protection to society from its most avowed and most persistent foes?

HOW TO INCREASE NATIONAL WEALTH BY THE EMPLOYMENT OF PARALYZED INDUSTRY.

BY B. O. FLOWER.

It is right and necessary that all men should have work to do which shall be worth doing and which should be done under such conditions as would make it neither over-wearisome nor over-anxious. Turn this claim about as I may, think of it as long as I can, I cannot find that it is an exorbitant claim.—William Morris.

On the 18th of last May, while in a small restaurant on Fifth Avenue, in Chicago, my attention was attracted by a large number of men who had congregated on both sides of the street in front of the office of the Chicago Daily News. In answer to my inquiry, a gentleman at my side explained that these men were waiting to see the “Want” column of the News, in the hope of being able to secure work. “It is an old, old story,” he continued. “Day after day crowds of men gather here and anxiously wait for the News to appear, as this paper contains more ‘Want’ advertisements than any other Chicago daily.” I waited until the boys rushed from the office with the newly printed papers, and saw the men hurriedly buy copies. I noticed how scores upon scores of eyes searched the “Help Wanted” columns, and how, one by one, they started in quest of work. I noticed the countenances of the weary watchers. Among them were to be seen almost all types of faces, but all, save one, were anxious, careworn, or stolid. I shuddered as, standing inside the restaurant unobserved, I beheld this sight of appalling misery and national shame. The faces of these men have haunted me ever since. Hunger was there, hate was there, despair was hovering over more than one countenance. There were wan, dull eyes, wolfish eyes, and eyes eloquent with mute appeals for kindness. There was the hunted look of a beast at bay, and the craven expression of a broken spirit. One only among the throng seemed able to be merry, though his thin face and worn clothes indicated his wretchedness. The tragedy of these lives remains with me. I know that this awful condition is unnecessary. I know that a little more conscience, a little more love, a keener sense of justice, and a little honest concern for the rights of men and the enduring welfare of the state, a settled determination to overcome this condition and place the good of the people and the cause of justice above a shortsighted policy of selfishness, would change the whole aspect of things, now so ominous, so menacing, and so essentially unjust. This panorama of exiled industry, seeking vainly for employment, may be witnessed from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

I am not of that number who can regard these spectacles with indifference, nor can I feel, as do some others, that because the present order is essentially unjust in its practical workings it is well to turn a cold shoulder to movements calculated to arrest the downward drift of life and lessen the unfathomable misery of the poor in order that the crisis may be hastened. For while I believe that the present order is as surely outgrown as was feudalism in the sixteenth century, and though I believe most profoundly that this order must pass away or civilization perish, as have perished the civilizations of former ages, yet I also appreciate the fact, which to me is very important, that the only way to bring about the revolution peaceably is, first, to educate the brain and touch the conscience of the people; and, second, to check the growing bitterness and hate in the hearts of our unfortunates by giving them employment and treating them with justice and humanity. If a crisis is precipitated, fed by blind hate and a bitterness born of a consciousness of injustice long endured, it will assume the form of an uncontrollable storm, a blind, passionate outburst, in which the guiding influences of reason, judgment, and conscience will be absent. It will spread devastation in all directions, destroying the innocent as well as the guilty. If, on the other hand, we push forward an intelligent educational agitation, appealing to the judgment, the conscience, and the sense of right in the people, and at the same time supply means for maintaining self-respecting manhood among the unemployed until this waiting time is over, our civilization will move onward without the crash or shock of force, the destruction of property, and the loss of life incident to all struggles in which physical force and blind passion dominate. It is necessary to examine this problem on the side of human dignity and on the side of national life. The question of utility, though of far less concern in its ultimate effect on conditions, has also an important place in the discussion.

Only under conditions which are fundamentally unjust, and only where the finer sensibilities of man have been blinded and deadened, could it be possible to witness the spectacle of millions of men and women begging for work, and begging in vain, in a nation of fabulous wealth and almost boundless resources; and yet such a condition prevails in our republic to-day. It is, therefore, time for every patriotic citizen to lay aside all partisan contentions and face this great question as we would face any great danger which suddenly came upon the nation, not as partisans, but as patriots; not as warring factions seeking victory for some special body or party, but as men and women who have the welfare of the race at heart, and who appreciate the gravity of the situation. It is the eternal law of recompense that when justice is long denied and the rights of man are systematically ignored, though the sufferers may Samson-like crush themselves in the ruins of the temple, yet the temple and its inmates also must fall. Or if by some chance the ruin comes not through the strength of the burdened ones, it will nevertheless come with unerring certainty, and not unfrequently through the very excesses of those who have hardened their hearts against the cry of justice.

Such is the interdependence of the units in national life that a wrong committed against one injures the whole people; and when that wrong is inflicted upon a large number of the units, and is of long duration, its fatal effects become very apparent. You cannot crush a finger or a toe without causing your whole body to suffer in consequence. You may disregard the hurt, you may ignore the wound until mortification sets in, but the result means death or the loss of one of the most valuable members of your body. It is precisely so with national life; for such is the divine economy, such the inevitable law of progress, that only by conscious recognition of human brotherhood, and of the rights and obligations which it implies, can any nation or civilization move onward and upward without those great periods of depression and decline which too frequently end in total eclipse.

Shortsighted, indeed, is that policy which places gold above manhood. When lust for gain stifles the voice of conscience, and the cry of the disinherited is heard throughout a land of marvellous wealth, a nation is confronted by a deadly peril which calls for a supreme effort on the part of every man and woman of conviction.

It is useless to close our eyes to the fact that the rising tide of bitterness is turning into hate, and that hate darkens the eye of judgment, obscures reason, and deadens conscience. A few years ago, when I wrote a brief paper on the menace of the unemployed, I was assured that the deplorable condition then present was temporary, that in a few months at most it would be a thing of the past, and that therefore it was not a problem calling for the intervention of the government; but to-day there are far more unemployed than there were then. The problem is assuming gigantic proportions, and the instincts of self-preservation second the demand of humanity in calling for immediate measures for the relief and the maintenance of self-respecting manhood. Whenever a workingman becomes a tramp or sinks into the social cellar, as tens of thousands are now doing, the nation suffers a real injury. Present conditions call for prompt action. The unemployed must receive that succor which will in no conventional sense be charity, but which will elevate instead of degrade. And this can be done by the state allowing those armies of men who now unwillingly represent unproductive labor to become armies for increasing the wealth of the country, by extending the productive area of the nation’s domain, and by providing against the ruin which constantly menaces tens of thousands of industrious people in such a way as to stimulate business in all its ramifications by placing in circulation the equivalents for the work performed and the wealth earned. The ancient Romans understood the importance of having great works substantially built. The mighty highways which centred in the Eternal City, and the great public works which contributed so much to the comfort and happiness and grandeur of Rome, while not constructed with a view to affording employment to the unemployed, were wise measures for the benefit of the state, and it is safe to say that no expenditures were more serviceable or contributed more to the greatness and essential wealth of the empire, save the money spent in the patronage of education.

The ancient Peruvians went further. They argued that the happiness, welfare, and prosperity of one was the concern of all. They banished poverty by giving every person productive work, and by their system transformed every foot of tillable land into productive gardens, enabling them to support in affluence an immense population, only a small fraction of which could have subsisted under conditions such as prevail with us. In our country to-day we have vast areas of useless land, only waiting to be transformed into tillable acres second in richness to no land in the country. To-day we have necessary work in the way of internal improvements which is imperatively demanded, and which, but for the slothfulness and indifference of our government, would be performed, thereby enormously increasing the wealth of the nation; while the performing of the same would give productive employment to millions of idle hands.

A striking illustration of the criminal neglect and shortsightedness of our government was seen this last spring in the devastation created by the floods in the Mississippi Valley, rendered possible through the inadequate levee system. Here the losses to crops and in stock killed are said to have been considerably over twelve million dollars, to say nothing of the enormous outlay which will be required to patch up the levees and make the devastated farms again habitable. This great loss would have been averted had the government acted upon the suggestions which I made some years ago in a paper on “Emergency Measures for Maintaining Self-respecting Manhood,” in which it was shown that a permanent levee was practicable, and could be built in such a way as to resist the floods, reclaim many hundreds of thousands of acres of rich land, and protect millions of dollars’ worth of property which is now under a yearly menace through danger of floods.

In this enterprise, which I shall again touch upon, we have a striking illustration of a practicable work which would immediately increase the national wealth far beyond the outlay required, while it would also change an army of idle consumers into an army of wealth-producers.

But as I wish to consider this question more at length a little later, I now pass on to a brief notice of the vast tracts of land in the West, which have not yet fallen into the clutches of land syndicates, and which for a comparatively small outlay by proper irrigation could be transformed into garden spots. Take, for example, the State of Nevada. Here we find immense tracts of arid land, representing millions of acres, which to-day are unproductive for lack of moisture, but which, wherever irrigation has been introduced, have been transformed into wonderfully productive garden land. Mr. William M. Smythe, in the April Forum, has given some very interesting facts in regard to the agricultural resources of Nevada, from which we summarize the following:

The most painstaking and systematic inquiry, however, ever made with regard to the extent of her water supply resulted in the conclusion that at least 6,000,000 acres of rich soil could be irrigated. The commission of 1893 reported twenty lakes and sixteen rivers of importance, which with minor streams and springs could be made to irrigate upward of 5,000,000 acres; and artesian wells would bring up the total to the figure above named. It should be borne in mind that the splendid agricultural prosperity of Colorado and Utah is based upon a cultivated area of only about 2,000,000 acres. It seems, then, that, so far as her agricultural capabilities are concerned, Nevada might sustain at least as many people as do Utah and Colorado put together, at their present stage of development. The products of the irrigated lands of Nevada are the fruits, the vegetables, cereals, and grasses of the temperate zone, and, in the extreme southern portions, the more delicate products of the semi-tropics, such as figs, olives, pomegranates, almonds, Madeira walnuts, and, in sheltered places, even oranges. When we add that Nevada, like all parts of the arid plateau, is distinguished for pure dry air, an extraordinary amount of sunshine, and consequently a very high degree of healthfulness, it can be scarcely maintained that the state is destitute of attractions.

What is true in regard to the possibilities of Nevada is true of large areas of land in other Western States and Territories. It must be remembered that irrigated land can be relied upon to yield bountiful crops with practical regularity, as the water-supply is ever present, while for most persons the fine pure air in these high regions is peculiarly healthful and invigorating. Thus the great West still offers millions of acres of exceedingly productive land which can be transformed into gardens and made to increase the national wealth by untold millions if the government will treat these tracts as any wise or thrifty private owner would treat them. If the government or the various commonwealths would take all the available land which can be irrigated and give to the unemployed work at fair wages until the great desert tracts become fertile areas, the national or state domain would be enormously increased in wealth at a relatively small cost through the wise employment of the now paralyzed hand of industry.

Returning to the question of the Mississippi river, let our national government build a permanent levee, which, like the great highways of ancient Rome, should be built to endure for generations.

“There are,” says ex-Governor Lionel Sheldon, “over twenty-three million acres exposed to overflow from the mouth of the Ohio to the Gulf of Mexico. The productive power of these lands is not excelled in any part of the world, and by proper cultivation they would annually add many hundreds of millions of dollars to the national wealth and afford profitable employment for several hundreds of thousands of people.”

Eminent engineers who have examined the levees under the auspices of the Mississippi river commissioners, agree that the problem is one which can be successfully solved if a sufficient amount is appropriated for so gigantic an undertaking, which would require substantial uniformity in the width of the channel of the river by building spurs and dikes at points where the Mississippi is too wide, the proper riveting of the banks wherever caving is likely to occur, together with the building of permanent levees of a height and strength sufficient to confine the waters in the channel. It is stated that since 1865 the cost of repairs has amounted to considerably over forty million dollars, yet owing to the fact that this work is of a temporary character the benefits which would be derived from a permanent levee are lost, and every few years the floods necessitate fresh expenditures of vast sums of money. Hence this patchwork policy is shortsighted and in the long run the most expensive. The carrying out of a comprehensive plan for permanent improvements by the erection of impregnable levees and the governing of the currents by dikes and spurs, would give us a territory, now absolutely useless, which would annually add hundreds of millions of dollars to our national wealth.

The great arid plains of the West and the levees of the Mississippi are merely examples of internal improvements of a perfectly legitimate character which could be undertaken most properly by the general government, under Sec. VIII of the Constitution, which authorizes the “raising of revenue to pay the debts and provide for the common defence and the general welfare of the United States.” By such internal improvements as those mentioned above the nation’s wealth would be increased to a far greater extent than by the amount of outlay required for the completion of the work, while these enterprises would at once give productive employment to our millions of out-of-works, and this army of employed would put into immediate circulation large sums of money which would at once stimulate business through all its ramifications and bring about the long-hoped-for good times.

But at the very threshold of the discussion we are met with the declaration that we have no money in the Treasury with which to carry on these great projects. Before answering this objection I wish to point out the fact that we have millions of dollars to spend for a useless navy, a navy which in the hands of our senile government does not protect the life or the property of American citizens, a navy which is a constant and an enormous expense. While almost unlimited sums can be raised for the building and equipment of battleships, we have not a dollar to aid honest industry to maintain self-respecting manhood by engaging in works which would add immensely to the real wealth of the nation.

And, again, before pointing out how this money could be raised, I would call attention to the fact that this cry is by no means a new one. It was raised, and with much more show of foundation, during the dark hours of the early sixties, but the great Civil War exploded the fallacy. One would think that in the presence of the stupendous facts connected with the conduct of our Civil War, even if the question of the value to the state of an independent, contented, and prosperous manhood should be left out of consideration, the shallowness of the objection would be so apparent that it would have no weight with thoughtful persons. Let us not forget that there was a time in the history of our country when the Treasury of our government was empty, a time of great national peril when gold had fled across the seas or into the vaults of the bankers and usurers, as it ever flees in time of danger, when public credit was greatly impaired by the presence of war within our borders and a strong probability that even if the national government escaped overthrow a large number of the States would become an independent nation. In this crisis we had men in charge of the government who were statesmen, men great enough to rise to the emergency of the hour. Now, if we were able under such conditions to carry to a successful termination the most expensive and memorable civil war of modern times by the aid of the greenback, surely there would be no risk in resorting to a similar medium of exchange for the carrying on of a work which would immediately add to the nation’s resources and free from the bondage of involuntary idleness a large army of men who are now a burden to society and a danger to stable government.

If, however, the fiction by which bondholders enslave the people still holds such power over our legislators and the public mind that the menace of the growing army of unemployed, the injury to the state by the enforced degradation of her children, and the continued unproductivity of both soil and industry must go on unless a concession is made, it would be wiser to make the concession than to let the crime against manhood continue. I therefore suggest that bonds on the land to be reclaimed be issued to the amount of the national notes used for these great works in redeeming the now useless land. The bonds issued against these lands could be cancelled as the lands were sold. I do not for a moment hold that this is necessary. I only advance this suggestion in case the prejudice fostered by selfish and interested classes might otherwise defeat a work of such inconceivable importance.

The inevitable result which would follow such wise, statesmanlike, and humane proceedings on the part of the government may be briefly summarized as follows:

Through this judicious, far-sighted, and enlightened course the government would, first, so strengthen and intrench herself in the hearts of the people that armories and militia would be little needed against the menace of lawlessness within our borders, while this wise solicitude and care for the welfare of her citizens would make millions of persons, who to-day have little or no love for a nation which is indifferent to their manly cry for work, loyal defenders of the flag. By such a broad, wise, and just course the United States would do more than she could in any other way to render herself impregnable in time of danger. Second, by affording millions of her citizens the opportunity to engage in productive work she would utilize a vast amount of idle energy in adding to the permanent wealth of the nation, and the state would be fulfilling the noble function of government to promote justice, increase happiness, and ennoble citizenship. She would be restoring hope and the spirit of independent manhood to her children, and so would prevent a great increase in beggary, in degradation, and in crime, which must inevitably follow unless present conditions are radically changed. From an economic point of view the government would be far richer through the amount saved from what otherwise would be required to provide prisons, poorhouses, and court expenses. Third, it would add vastly to the nation’s wealth in increasing by untold millions the annual product of real wealth, while it would also supply homes for millions of home-seekers. Fourth, it would bring prosperity to America.

Let us suppose three millions of those now idle should be thus enabled to engage in productive work, there would then be placed in circulation each week from five to ten million dollars more money than there is now, and it would be paid out in small amounts, so that the bulk of it would instantly go into general circulation. The men would not only purchase for their own needs, but would send a part of their earnings to their loved ones, who would thus be able to do what they cannot now do—buy coal, wood, groceries, and, indeed, life’s various necessaries. The prices of the farmer’s crops would naturally rise, and he in turn would be able to increase his buildings and purchase more machinery. The increased demand for clothing would raise the price of wool and cotton, while it would start up the factories without any resort to artificial measures, such as levying a tax on imported goods.

The difference between present hard times and low prices and good times and high prices would be illustrated in this way: To-day millions of our people are idle, a load and an expense; they cannot buy what they need at any price, for they have nothing to buy with. Millions of others have to curtail in every way, frequently doing without many needed things, for times are such that it is impossible for them to do more than barely subsist. Now, the millions who to-day buy nothing, because they have nothing to buy with, under these provisions for internal improvements would soon be buying regularly, because they would have the wherewithal to buy. They would gladly pay the farmer, manufacturer, and merchant more than what they now ask because they would have something to buy with, while to-day they have nothing; and those other millions who are curtailing expenses to the last degree would gladly pay the increased amount, for all lines of productive business would receive an impetus from the great addition to the circulating medium put forth as a result of the productive work being carried on. Now, our tariff taxes may put up prices for the favored classes, but they thereby increase the burdens of all save those who are enabled to gain added wealth from the taxes imposed on the millions who are yet able to buy, while the small increase in the demand for work, so long as millions are unable to buy what is made, would make but little impression on the vast army of unemployed.

A tariff tax is a burden to the millions, stimulating prices artificially, and benefiting chiefly the very wealthy. But the plan for internal improvements here outlined would give all ablebodied men productive work which would benefit the nation far more than the amount of the outlay involved, and afford time for the general work of education, by which justice and equitable conditions could be brought about, to proceed. Those who love peace, those who would see mankind elevated and the wealth of the nation preserved and increased, should favor this great palliative movement for maintaining self-respecting manhood, for enriching the nation’s resources, and for insuring prosperity in the quickest and most healthful manner possible.

AN OPEN LETTER TO EASTERN CAPITALISTS.

BY CHARLES C. MILLARD.

Gentlemen: Against you individually, or as a class of persons who have accumulated more or less wealth, and who loan it at interest to those who perhaps have been less fortunate, I have not the least prejudice. I believe that yours is an honest as well as a legitimate business; that great wealth may be, and often is, won by honest means; and that it does not border upon the marvellous that the capitalist is often an honest man, and the pauper as often a rogue. I believe that you are as honest as other men are, and that if you fully understood the situation in the West and South, and knew that a certain line of conduct would result to your own advantage financially, and also be a great benefit to the whole country, you would act as other honest people would act under similar circumstances; and it is because I so believe, that I write this letter.

I write neither as a partisan nor in the interests of any party, but to give plain facts which can be easily verified, and to show how these facts are seen and felt by those who, like myself, have been born and bred on the boundless prairies, and have had a varied experience with the ups and downs of life on the sunset side of the Father of Waters. I hope by so doing to help you to realize the extent of the disasters which a continuance of the present financial policy will inevitably bring to you as well as to us.

The Actual Condition.

In 1886, the chief clerk and trusted agent of a great loan company, who has since been in the employ of Jarvis Conklin & Co., said to me: “There is plenty of money to loan, but the securities are practically exhausted.” Everything “in sight” was covered with a mortgage. The few who had escaped the mania of speculation did not want any mortgage on farm or city property. Loans since then have been mostly renewals, and for a time one company loaned money to be paid to another; but, with a few exceptions, the Eastern money borrowed since 1880 has not been paid, and anyone familiar with the facts does not need the gift of prophecy to foretell that, under the present conditions, it never can or will be paid.

The mortgages, bonds, and most of the coupons you still hold, and, in many cases, you also have a deed to the property; but neither the one nor the other is of any practical present value. The mortgagor is dead, moved away, bankrupt, or working at daily labor—when he can get work—for his daily bread. Therefore the debt is worthless, and the property is but little better. The very best of it—costly business blocks in the heart of the cities—is unremunerative. No intelligent poor man would, or could, take a brick block as a gift and keep the taxes and interest paid.

And perhaps the larger share of the city property is unoccupied or paying no rental. He who rides upon a Western railroad can see the proof of this from the car windows. In every city, town, village, and on not a few farms, can be seen the broken or boarded-up windows which are the footprints, not of time, but of the Eastern mortgage. This property belongs to you. No Western man pays taxes or interest, and no one expects to pay the principal. No one wants the property; no one has any use for it; and no want ever existed which it was calculated to fill, except in the brain of the monomaniac who built it. Whether you have “foreclosed” or not, the property is virtually yours; the mortgagor has no equity in it. While he had an equity, the decline in prices affected that equity; now it affects only your interest.

You own our business buildings, mansions, and cottages. You have an everlasting grip on our public buildings, Board of Trade halls, Young Men’s Christian Association buildings, and even our churches. The Rev. Mr. Wooley, in the pulpit of the Central Christian Church of Wichita, said recently: “Every church building in this city, except one, is heavily incumbered, and most of them are practically insolvent.” Even the “calamity howlers” of the “Populist” party are afraid or ashamed to tell the truth, “and the whole truth,” about our financial condition.

And it is not improving. A few farm mortgages are being paid, and scarcely any new ones are being made except renewals; but all the reduction so made is more than equalled by the sum of defaulted interest payments on mortgages outstanding. The statements in the papers, that the mortgage indebtedness of Kansas—or some other State—was reduced so many thousand dollars during the past year, are misleading. They are regularly published to restore “confidence.” For the benefit of my Eastern brother, I will explain, lest he may imagine that we are each year paying back more money than we borrowed during that time, and that therefore, in the course of geologic time, our debts would be paid.

The “reduction” is a reduction of record only. I have known of the payment of $25 to reduce the record of $650, and $20 to make a “reduction” of $400; and for various reasons many mortgages are cancelled without any cash payment. These are well-known facts, and I could give a long list of those which have come under my own personal observation, while the mortgages which I have known to be paid in full might be counted on the fingers of one hand.

In addition to this, nearly every city or incorporated town, and many of the counties, have a bonded indebtedness as large as they can possibly carry. In some cases bonds have been issued and sold to pay interest on other bonds, and in one case at least—Pratt Centre—the interest payments have been discontinued “by order of the council.”

The Future Prospect.

So far I have been dealing only with the past and the present, and have given only a plain statement of facts, the value of which must depend upon my capacity as an observer, my opportunities for observation, and my truthfulness as a writer. If you are inclined to be sceptical, inquire of your neighbors who hold, or have held, Western mortgages. The value of my forecast of the immediate future must depend upon the character of my reasoning and judgment.

As “death and taxes” are certain, it is safe to predict that taxes will be levied to pay the interest, and afterwards the principal, of city bonds. Also, it may be assumed that you, who own the larger and more valuable share of the property, will pay the lion’s share of the taxes. The Western man has “let go”; he is not “in the deal”; and when one capitalist is taxed to pay another, he is not an “interested” party. I sympathize with you. You have exchanged good money for bad property; and with the property you have assumed the bulk of our burden of taxation. You must pay our bonds, pay for the repairs and improvements of public property, pay for educating our children and making our laws, and yet you have no voice in determining when, how, or to what extent these things shall be done; nor power to prevent the jobs and steals which accompany such transactions in Kansas as well as in New York.

But, notwithstanding my sympathy, and the additional fact that I must indirectly suffer from the effects of your suicidal policy, it is amusing to see you trying to squeeze the remaining value out of your own property. For, I repeat, it is yours. Interest payments will cease in the same ratio that they have ceased, and for the same reasons. And the principal cause will be that the mortgagor has discovered that he has no equity in the property. If property is worth only “what it will bring in money,” there are few pieces of mortgaged property in the West in which there still remains an equity. But many farmers are economizing and wearing rags in order to make interest payments, which can only result in putting the evil day a little further off.

The Westerner is a practical man. When he finds that the equity is all squeezed out of his property, and that it is still being squeezed at the same rate, he stops paying taxes and interest, uses the property free while you are foreclosing, saves up a little money, buys a house for about one-tenth of the money it cost to build it, moves it onto a “clear” lot, and is then ready to help you squeeze your property by voting for taxes for various purposes. Under like circumstances the farmer raises one or two crops without rent, taxes, or interest, clothes his family more comfortably, replaces worn-out machinery, rents a farm, and is in better circumstances than he has been for years.

The Proposed Remedy.

It may be that there is no remedy, but that will not prevent us from trying to find one. During the last ten years we have experimented. We have tried Democratic rule and Republican rule; the “McKinley bill” and the “Wilson bill”; “tariff for protection” and “tariff for revenue only”; a Treasury “surplus” and a Treasury “deficit”; yet none of these things have sensibly affected the squeezing process. We have lost our faith in the tariff and in tariff-tinkering, as well as in the leaders who recommend it. We have dismissed our old political leaders and chosen new ones; and as your “gold-standard” squeezing policy is the only rational cause “in sight” for the origin and continuance of our condition—to use an expressive Western phrase—we are “going for it.”

We are willing that you should own and control the property which was ours, and in which your money was invested, but when you attempt to force upon us your financial policy, your politics, and your religion, we object. You may own and control the property, but not us; here we draw the line. This is what Marsh Murdock had in his mental view when he said at the St. Louis Convention, “You want to own the country and run it too.” But the veteran editor of the Eagle has changed his mind and consented to being “run.”

You have bought the leading papers, caused our editors to “change their minds,” flooded the country with a trashy literature that is an insult to our intelligence, and provided funds to pay third-rate preachers for preaching to us a religion which we do not want. We are not rich, yet we are able to pay for our education and our religion—if it is a kind that will be of any use to us.

We do not fear the result of our experiment. If we fail, the same old squeeze will continue; if we succeed, there is a prospect of relief. Without variation, there is not even a prospect of bettering our condition. If we should succeed in creating that financial paradox, a fifty-three-cent dollar, we are such political heretics as to prefer that kind of a dollar to none, or to “confidence.” We have unbounded confidence in the dollars which jingle in our pockets, but very little in those which exist only in the imagination, and are represented by stocks, bonds, checks, drafts, clearing-house certificates, and other devices, which always fail to perform the function of money in the last extremity, when money is most needed.

Do not allow yourselves to be terrified at the ghost of a silver dollar, for the ghost of it is all that will ever trouble you. In the event of free coinage, the trains going East will not be loaded with silver dollars to pay off old mortgages. I have seen a statement in Eastern papers to the effect that we wanted cheap money with which to pay our debts. It is a base slander; every intelligent Western man knows that, whatever happens short of the miraculous, only a small share of our mortgage debts will be paid.

All the holdings you now have in the West, new and old taken together, are not worth fifty-three cents on the dollar; and you cannot now in any way realize that much from them; and if your present policy is indefinitely continued you have no prospect of ever realizing fifty-three per cent on your investments. If, then, you should be paid in silver dollars, or if a larger share of the loans should be paid under the new conditions, you would be a gainer and not a loser by the change. It seems to me that an increase in the volume of money and rising prices are the opportunity for you to realize from your holdings, for without some favorable change you will hardly realize twenty-five per cent.

You can test the truth of these statements. Take twenty holdings, not selected, and try to convert them into cash. Or offer them to some capitalist who has travelled extensively in the West during the last five years. Time will convince you, if nothing else will; but the knowledge may come a little too late for practical purposes. You ought to be with us in this free-silver movement, and you would be if you knew what we know. We are not fools, although we may appear so to you; we know what we want, and we are trying to get it.

You threaten “to draw in your money from the West.” If you have any money in the West which you can “draw in,” the sooner you do it the better; it will be an heroic remedy instead of misery long drawn out. A “panic” will return like a boomerang upon yourselves, and make your property still less valuable. You can cause a panic, break our business men, make more idle men and tramps, and, in short, concentrate three or four years of squeezing into a few weeks or months; but what benefit can you hope to derive from it?

Whatever adds to our prosperity will increase the actual value of your holdings; our interests are identical, then why should you desire the continuance of present conditions? Have the present conditions done anything for you, as far as Western investments are concerned? Is not your increase of capital simply an increase “on paper” which you can never realize? We cordially invite you to join us in our effort to bring on an era of prosperity; forsake your political leaders, as we have forsaken ours, and use at least as much common sense in politics as you do in business.

Save this article; it will be good reading after the election is over. It is not politics, it is business; it is the naked truth. The writer does not want to borrow any money; he seeks no office, is not a politician, has no axe to grind, and expects no reward, except to share in the general prosperity, as he has shared in the general adversity, in the capacity of a humble citizen.

Wichita, Kansas.

THE TELEGRAPH MONOPOLY.

BY PROF. FRANK PARSONS.

XIII.

10. The Union of Telegraph and Post is needed for the Interests of the Post as well as for those of the Telegraph. It will elevate the skill and competency of postal employees. When mails do not arrive on time, it will inform the public thronging the post office, not merely that the mail has not arrived, but when it will arrive. It will permit the employment of the telegraph in tracing a missent letter or package, rectifying an erroneous address, discovering the whereabouts of an absentee, etc. It will permit the more rapid extension of the free-delivery system by affording a larger basis for its sustenance. It will multiply many fold the rapidity in transmitting letters across the continent.

The telegraph is naturally a part of the post office,[3] as much a part of it as the sewing machine is a part of a dressmaking establishment. Suppose the government were in the clothing business (as it might have been to advantage during the war), and continued to sew the garments entirely by hand, leaving the sewing machine to private enterprise; it would be a charming situation for private enterprise, but not very delightful for the government. With such advantages private enterprise would be apt to deprive the government of the best part of its business in spite of its willingness to work for people at cost. The same thing has happened to some extent with the telegraph and telephone, and will happen to a far greater extent if they are allowed to continue in private control. If trunk lines for automatic transit were established by a private company, even at 25 cents per hundred words (a rate sufficient to pay a very large profit on a corporate investment, water and all), the post office would soon lose a considerable portion of its most valuable business, the letter mail between the large cities.[4]

In times of pestilence the telegraph will save the post office from embargo. A letter from Port Gibson, Miss., says:

Whenever the yellow fever breaks out at any point, all cities and towns, and some counties, having communication with the infected districts, at once declare a rigid quarantine. The effect of this is to cut off all communication between themselves and the outside world. Trains and boats are prevented from receiving or delivering the mails. Business men are unable to communicate by letter with their correspondents, and all are prevented from hearing from relatives and friends in the quarantined places, except by telegraph, whose rates prevent many from using the wires.[5]

The infection does not travel on an electric wire, and if the post office possessed the telegraph, its business would go smoothly on in spite of the plague, instead of being brought to a dead standstill throughout the region of disaster at the very time when hearts are breaking for daily news, and communication is of the utmost importance to alleviate the quarantine.

11. Employees will be benefited by passing from a régime of oppression to one of elevation; from low wages[6] and long hours to high wages and short hours; from a service almost hopeless of promotion to a service of almost limitless possibilities to the man of character, brain, and energy; from an employment in which they are regarded as so much machinery to be obtained at the lowest market rates and worked for all the profit there is in them to an employment in which their comfort and advancement are among the main objects of solicitude with the management; from a business in which they have no share to a business in which they are equal partners with all their fellow-citizens; from serfdom to liberty and manhood. No more boycotting and black-listing, no more denial of the rights of organization and petition.

Some of the consequences will be the lifting of thousands to a higher plane of living, the annihilation of strikes by uprooting the causes of them,[7] the improvement of the service as already stated under the seventh sub-head of this section, etc., etc.

12. The press will be relieved of an ever present tyranny likely at any moment to transfer itself from the potential to the real.[8] Sen. Report 242, 43-1, p. 5, says:

The operation of the postal-telegraph system would result in a speedy termination of this alliance [between the telegraph and news association, and groups of favored papers], and will be a very important step toward the freedom of the press.

Sen. Rep. 577, 48-1, p. 16, says:

The bill [for a postal telegraph] will lessen the danger of a concealed censorship of news whereby it may be colored and distorted so as to subserve political purposes, to mislead public opinion as to the merits or demerits of men and measures, to pervert legislation, and to favor schemes of private gain.

The press of the nation will not be forbidden to criticise the news, nor will any paper be excluded from equal participation in the benefits of the telegraph service—equal rates to all, special privileges to none. Moreover, the rates will be greatly reduced for all press despatches, and papers will be able to buy the world’s history every day for a fraction of what they pay now for imperfect and garbled reports.

As a result of National Ownership in England, “the press rates have been reduced so low that every country paper can afford to print the latest telegraphic despatches as it goes to press, and a telegraph or telephone is at every country post office.”[9]

13. Discrimination will receive a serious blow. No more telegraph rebates of 20 or 40 or 50 per cent to favored individuals and corporations. No more telegraph blanks for legislators, politicians, and lobbyists. No more delaying B’s despatch until the rival message of C is sent. No more precedence for bucket-shops and gamblers over honest business and government despatches.

14. Gambling in government stocks will cease, speculators in wheat, corn, pork, copper, oil, and other products of industry will be unable to control the wires for their uses, or even secure a precedence over the lines, and the Louisiana Lottery and similar frauds will no longer find a refuge in the telegraph as they do at present. The post office has been taken away from the gamblers; it is time the telegraph were taken from them also. The telegraph in the hands of cunning men may be the means of abstracting millions of money from the producers of the country, and may even become a potent factor in the causation of panic and depression. On page 3 of his Argument for a postal telegraph, Mr. Wanamaker says:

The measureless body of producers, in order not to be manipulated and robbed by the speculators, need to be nearer the consumers; and the measureless body of consumers, in order not to be manipulated and robbed by the same speculators, need to be nearer to the producers.

Take the telegraph away from the speculators and give it to the producers and consumers, that they may come into the closest possible relations.

15. Political corruption will lose an able contributor when the telegraph ceases to belong to a private corporation (See Part VII, Arena, July, 1896).

16. A Postal telegraph will be a step toward a fairer distribution of wealth and away from the congestion of power and wealth in the hands of a few unscrupulous men, which is one of the chief dangers threatening the future of the country (See Part VIII, Arena, August, 1896). On this ground alone the establishment of a national telegraph would be justified, were there no other reason in the case.

17. The public safety demands a national telegraph, not merely as a precaution against corruption, speculation, and panic, congestion of wealth and power, strikes, and duress of the press, but also as a military measure and a valuable addition to the police power of the government,—a means of strength in time of war, and a conservator of law and order by aiding in the capture of criminals and in the general enforcement of the law. We have already quoted the opinion of Mr. Scudamore that the postal telegraph “will strengthen the country from hostility from without, and the maintaining of law and order within the kingdom.” Let us call attention here to the weighty words of the New York Public, cited in Wanamaker’s Argument, pp. 206-7:

The Government itself absolutely needs a telegraphic system for its own protection. This will not seem the language of exaggeration when it is considered that the ordinary enforcement of laws, the capture of offenders, the success of fiscal operations, the protection of the country against domestic insurrection and foreign invasion, have come to depend in these days upon the instant transmission of intelligence with certain and absolute secrecy. It may at any time come to pass that the private interests of those controlling a telegraph system shall require the non-enforcement of the law, the prevention or delay of a financial operation, or the partial success of a domestic outbreak or foreign inroad. It is nonsense to say that this cannot happen. If Mr. Gould could suppress for a few hours or days, news of an outbreak on the Pacific coast or of the capture of a hostile ironclad from Europe, he could make millions by it. The Government has no certainty that he would throw away millions. It has no certainty that its orders bearing on great financial operations may not be betrayed and its aims thwarted. When the Government was hunting for the Star Route offenders, how many would have been caught if its despatches had been secretly betrayed? An important witness happened to be a Government director of the Union Pacific Railroad, and it has always been a mysterious fact that the officers in search of him could never catch him.

18. It will be a step toward civil-service reform. Every increase of public business brings us nearer to thorough civil-service reform, because it enhances the importance of that reform, impresses the need of it more strongly upon the people, and deepens their sentiment in its favor. This has been the experience of European cities and states. A good reason why they are ahead of us in civil-service management, is because they are ahead of us in the public ownership of railroads, telegraphs, telephones, etc.

In the case of the telegraph there are special reasons to expect that government control would carry with it an extension of the civil-service principle. In the opinion of Mr. Rosewater the postal telegraph “would be an entering wedge for the greatest possible success of the civil service.” He says:

It would bring into the postal service a large number of skilled operatives whose services could not be easily dispensed with. They would be divided in politics like every other class of citizens, their experience and trustworthiness would be of great moment, and their trustworthiness would be increased by the knowledge that they could not be displaced by partisan politics. This has been the experience in Great Britain, and would be the same here. Once get the postal service under government control and the civil-service act, and you would soon be able to place all departments of the government under the same system, and a large share of the public nuisance incident to office-holding would be done away with, leaving the officers free to inquire into and learn their duties to their office and to the public.[10]

Prof. Ely says:

One of the strongest arguments in favor of a postal telegraph, is that such a telegraph would carry with it an improvement in our civil service. It would increase the number of offices in which civil-service rules would be applied, even according to existing law, and it would be an irresistible argument in favor of the extension and elevation of the civil service. Some want to have us wait until the civil service has been already improved, but the purchase of the telegraph lines would inevitably carry with it the improvement of the civil service.

The country would insist upon it. The acquisition of the telegraph lines by the nation would convert more people to civil-service reform in one day than all the speeches which have ever been delivered on the subject would win to this good cause in a year.[11]

The plan advocated in this paper includes the civil-service act as one of its essential terms, for without it we run the risk of having, for a time at least, boss-ownership instead of public ownership of the telegraph. The recent extension of the civil-service act to 30,000 new positions, argues well for the future of this great reform.[12] That such an order should have come from President Cleveland, who has not been noted for his absence of partisan feeling, indicates that the election of a man of thorough independence would probably complete the transformation of our service. Even without that, the work will be done by the piece, each president ordering a section into line at the end of his term when the delay of justice can no longer aid his own political purposes, but may, on the contrary, strengthen his successor. Or he may act before the end of his term and from less selfish motives; the main thing for the nation is that he act.

19. The public ownership of the telegraph will remove one of the antagonisms that weaken the cohesion of society and retard the development of civilization.[13]

20. It will be a step toward coöperation and partnership, away from private monopoly, usurpations, and taxation without representation.[14]

Let us now see what the defendants have to say; that means the Western Union, for, as Mr. Bell said to the Senate Committee on Post offices and Post roads, May 20th, 1896:

The only persons who have ever put in an appearance in opposition to this measure, have been the officers, attorneys, and agents of the telegraph companies. No representative of the people has ever opposed it.[15]

THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT OF THE CUBANS.

BY THOMAS W. STEEP.

When the recognition of belligerency was argued for the Cubans by the friends of Cuba in Congress, it became a question of pivotal importance as to whether the Cubans had a government to recognize as dual to that of Spain; whether the government, if any, was merely nominal or chimerical; whether, if existing and operating, it had the potency to receive recognition and thus justify such action by the United States.

The first thing that attracted my interest on arriving at the war field of Cuba, in the Province of Santiago, early one sunny morning in January, was the obsequious ceremony of the government prefecto who received me and gave me my first roasted boniato, upon which I afterwards so often appeased hunger. I had come out on the field by crawling beneath the barbed-wire military line around Santiago one night and marching by stealth in the early dawn to the mountains and over them to the interior. A body of Cubans escorted me. Fatigued and hungry, the prefecto’s attention in serving coffee and boniatos seemed over-due kindness. I offered to pay him, but he raised his hands and said, “No! No!” He was a government officer. From that time on my interest was enlisted in the study of the civil organization of the Cubans.

When ex-President Cleveland intimated that the civil government provisional of the Cuban insurgents was puerile and immature, and said it was, for the most part, a government on paper, he was more correct than otherwise. In the first place, however, let me say that the Cubans have a government, that it is not an impractical one, that the people are loyal to it. To this loyalty, which is so striking for its widespread prevalence, and so sympathy-eliciting because of the sacrifices which are made for it by the Cubans, I shall refer later.

The statement made by the ex-President, while for the most part correct, is superficial, because it does not substantiate its assertiveness. It is one that any intelligent observer of the anterior conditions of Cuba last December might have correctly though vaguely made.

The Cuban government is immature. To say that most of it exists on paper is not sinistrous to an ambitious civil organization which has been in existence but two years. Schemed exactly like that of the States, the unfavorable condition under which it labors makes many of its functions of mere nominal existence. For instance, the Secretary of State just at this time has no duty to perform other than, perhaps, to doff his figurative robes of state and get out and fight. The Secretary of War has no routine office, because the Cubans have no diplomatic corps and the rebellion is conducted by aggressive generals who have the munitions of war in their own hands.