dred thousand shares a day" on the horns of our bull, and to put the same amount of securities under the custody of our bear. "This conclusion takes it for granted that the profits should be equally divided among the membership." Such are Mr. Clews's very words. By the bond of my faith! there is nothing else so beautiful and magnificent as this among the arts invented by mankind! As for the people, one of your own kings, Messieurs of the Street, has very properly indicated your wish and purpose with regard to them.

Mr. Clews tells us that the “Future" of Wall Street is a sealed book; and yet we may allow that "there is such a thing as an accurate prevision of events." Of this kind are eclipses, occultations, and tides of the sea. If the capital of Wall Street has, since the institution was founded, increased more than sixtyfold, as Mr. Clews declares, then we may expect it, according to his philosophy, to increase full sixty times sixty, until the world shall be swallowed up. Then, when Threadneedle and Lombard Streets shall have lost their sceptre; then, when Seneca's forecast of the time to come shall have been fulfilled; then, when Macaulay's New Zealander shall have made his sketch, not only of St. Paul's, but also of the bank of England; then, when all the wealth, and all the power, and all the functions of civil society in the United States shall have been transferred to Wall Street; then, when nothing shall remain to the American people except their squalid huts and the sorrowful reminiscences of a great republic; then, when Wall Street in very truth shall have possessed itself of the earth and consumed mankind, I suppose that the benovelent owners of the world will found a few libraries, build a few marble mausoleums for themselves, and sally forth to establish a stock exchange in Mars! That done, interplanetary wars may be engendered, bonds on the solar system may be issued and bought at half price, a gold standard of values may be fixed on the basis of the pound sterling good from the sun out to Neptune, and the inhabitants of the worlds, either by arms or by journalism, may become the helots of consolidated wealth enthroned as the governing power of the universe.

THE REFORM CLUB'S FEAST OF UNREASON.

BY HON. CHARLES A. TOWNE,

Chairman Provisional National Committee Silver Republican Party.

O

N Saturday evening, April 24, 1897, at the Waldorf Hotel, New York, there was held a political banquet intended as a most impressive function, but which has passed into history as a very ridiculous one. Big with selfcomplacence and puffed with pride, as it appeared in the bril liant lights and gorgeous appointments of the palatial supper hall, within twenty-four hours the lacerating indignation of Mr. Watterson and the trenchant raillery of Mr. Bryan had let the tumid pretentiousness all out of it, and it had collapsed into a flaccid and "innocuous desuetude." The "star-eyed goddess turned her back upon it, the "wild-orbed anarch" snapped his fingers at it, and even everyday Mrs. Grundy laughed it to scorn. Projected with the most alluring and satisfying expectations, the feast has dwindled to the memory of a sad mistake in the mind of every man that assisted at it. Planned as a sort of coronation ceremony, its completed performance unaccountably wore the complexion of belated obsequies irreverently disturbed by the guffaws of the multitude.

But the aspect of this banquet as a piece of ill-conceived political strategy that never was formidable, or as a rite in the ceremonial of a hero-worship that is as inexplicable as inopportune, does not now so much concern me as does its office as a dispenser of misinformation and unsound philosophy, which are always dangerous. Many who condemn the folly of it as a move in practical politics nevertheless loudly commend the economic doctrines it contributed to spread. But inasmuch as, in my opinion, the science it taught is as bad as the politics it practised, I propose to call attention to a few of the arrogant assumptions and mischievous theories that found emphatic and repeated expression at this feast.

Did the purpose of this article permit, it would be interesting to make Mr. Cleveland's speech the text of some examination

into the ex-President's peculiarities of style. It was Clevelandesque to the core. All his protuberant characteristics are there: the leviathanic egotism, the profound and tenebrous ponderosity, the labored intricacy of the commonplace, the pedagogic moralizing, the oracular inconsequence. How absurdly obvious it all is now, and how inexplicable that the glamour of high place should ever have clothed such matter as his with the seeming of philosophy and statesmanship! 'Tis the very frippery and trumpery of the stage after the lights are out and the audience has departed.

In his opening Mr. Cleveland says: "On every side we are confronted with popular depression and complaint." This language stirs an echo of the long ago. In his special message to the extra session of the Fifty-third Congress in August, 1893, he thus announced a similar condition: "Suddenly financial distrust and fear have sprung up on every side." But he accounts differently for these two identical phenomena. The situation to-day he largely attributes to "the work of agitators and demagogues." In 1893 he declared: "I believe these things are principally chargeable to Congressional legislation touching the purchase and coinage of silver by the general government."

The ex-President's explanations are both wrong, and nobody ought to know it so well as himself. His relations with the great gold bankers were exceedingly intimate in 1892 and 1893, and have been so ever since. It is notorious that the panic of 1893 was a bankers' panic deliberately brought about by these men to frighten public sentiment into supplementing their demand for the repeal of the purchasing clause of the Sherman law of 1890. The agitation against that law was a whooped-up and manufactured agitation. No legitimate interest had suffered from its operation. On the contrary, the access of standard silver dollars coined under the laws of 1878 and 1890 had been of incalculable advantage to the country. In his annual message of December 2, 1890, President Harrison had thus referred to this fact: "The general tendency of the markets was upward from influences wholly apart from the recent tariff legislation. The enlargement of our currency by the silver bill undoubtedly gave an upward tendency to trade and had a marked effect on prices." And again: "It is gratifying to know that the increased circulation secured by

the act has exerted and will continue to exert a most beneficial influence upon business and upon general values."

Such an influence that circulation did indeed continue to exert. The comparative prosperity of the two following years, which, in contrast with the conditions of the subsequent period, causes 1892 to wear to wistful eyes so beautiful a hue in these unhappy days, would have been an absolute impossibility but for the silver legislation.

Nor was the credit of the government menaced. It was a malicious afterthought that represented the silver dollar as a charge upon the credit of the nation. That dollar was a standard dollar. It was never "redeemed" in anything but the money-work it did. There was no law for its redemption, and there was as yet no attempt, such as Mr. Carlisle in 1896 declared himself ready to make, to commit the crime of an administrative degradation of the circulating silver dollars into promises for the payment of gold. The Treasury Notes, issued in payment for silver bullion under the law of 1890, were redeemable in either gold or silver at the discretion of the Secretary of the Treasury; and inasmuch as there was silver behind every one of them, they could become a menace to the credit of the government only in case of the betrayal of his duty by that official.

But the contractionists looked with alarm upon the improving conditions of the country. Something must be done to discredit silver, or by and by there might arise such a demand for the full restoration of its mint privileges and money powers as could not be balked, as every similar demand had been balked since 1873; and in that event the slow villany of many years would have been fruitless and the contractionists' occupation would be gone. Then was formed the deep design to compel the repeal of the purchasing clause of the Sherman law. The gigantic forces that had been behind Mr. Cleveland in the memorable campaign of 1892 had not lost their cunning or their power. They knew their implements, and they had had much experience. Their strategy was customary and it was effective. To-day Mr. Cleveland complains because the Republican party, having won the contest of last November on the money question, should have hurried into the current extra session on the tariff

question. Let him recall his own course when, having carried the country in 1892 on the tariff question, he summoned the extra session of 1893 to consider the money question. Such a reflection might possibly assist him in fathoming the present motives of the men who won in 1892 to achieve the gold standard and in 1896 to preserve it.

For the election of Mr. Cleveland was a carefully executed move in an elaborate and merciless programme. The president of a national bank in North Dakota, a man of character and thorough reliability, has recently made public a conversation between himself and a prominent New York bank president, held not long after that election, in which the latter, whose institution was a member of the Associated National Banks, declared in substance as follows: "We have just elected Grover Cleveland President of the United States upon the express understanding with us that the policy of the administration shall be to uphold and advance the gold standard"; and he foretold, with startlingly faithful prevision, the repeal of the Sherman purchase law, the successive bond-issues, and the general and ruinous fall of prices, which seem to have evidenced the strict performance of the agreement by the party of the second part.

How persistently the power of the executive was used, and how carefully the offices were dispensed, to influence Senators and members of Congress against the Sherman law, were matters of ordinary comment at the time. Meanwhile the banks were putting in motion their peculiar and enormous persuasions. For months no man could go into any bank in any State of the Union for any purpose without having thrust under his nose, with a more or less pointed request for his signature, a petition demanding the repeal of the obnoxious statute. Then, in the latter days of April, 1893, on the stock exchange, there began that concerted onslaught upon stocks and values, vaunted as an "objectlesson" to the people, as a result of which within eight months six hundred of the relatively smaller banking institutions of the country went down, dragging with them fifteen thousand industrial and business enterprises, involving a total loss of seven hundred and fifty millions of dollars.

The object-lesson served its purpose. With the business