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

WH

OF CRIMINALS.

BY NORMAN ROBINSON.

HAT 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