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1. Such a bank tends to subjugate the government, as 'I have already shown in the history of what happened to the British minister in the year 1795.

2. It tends to collusions between the government and the bank in the terms of the loans, as has been fully experienced in England in those frauds upon the people, and insults upon the understanding, called three per cent. loans, in which the govern ment for about £50 borrowed became liable to pay £100.

3. It tends to create public debt, by facilitating public loans and substituting unlimited supplies of paper for limited supplies of coin. The British debt is born of the Bank of England. That bank was chartered in 1694, and was nothing more nor less in the beginning than an act of Parliament for the incorporation of a company of subscribers to a government loan. The loan was £1,200,000, the interest £80,000, and the expenses of management £4,000. And this is the birth and origin, the germ and nucleus of that debt, which is now £900,000,000 (the unfunded items included), which bears an interest of £30,000,000, and costs £260,000 for annual management.

4. It tends to beget and prolong unnecessary wars, by furnishing the means of carrying them on without recurrence to the people. England is the ready example for this calamity. Her wars for the restoration of the Capet Bourbons were kept up by loans and subsidies created out of bank paper. The people of England had no interest in these wars, which cost them about £600,000,000 of debt in twenty-five years, in addition to the supplies raised within the year. The kings she put back upon the French throne were not able to sit on it. Twice she put them on; twice they tumbled off in the mud; and all that now remains of so much sacrifice of life and money is the debt, which is eternal; the taxes, which are intolerable; the pensions and titles of some warriors, and the keeping of the Capet Bourbons, who are returned upon their hands.

5. It tends to aggravate the inequality of fortunes; to make the rich richer, and the poor poorer; to multiply nabobs and paupers, and to deepen and widen the gulf which separates Dives from Lazarus. A great moneyed power is favorable to great capitalists, for it is the principle of money to favor money. It is unfavorable to small capitalists, for it is the principle of money to eschew the needy and unfortunate. It is injurious to the laboring classes, because they receive no favors and have the price

of the property they wish to acquire raised to the paper maximum, while wages remain at the silver minimum.

6. It tends to make and to break fortunes, by the flux and reflux of paper. Profuse issues and sudden contractions perform this operation, which can be repeated, like planetary and pestilential visitations, in every cycle of so many years; at every periodical return, transferring millions from the actual possessors of property to the Neptunes who preside over the flux and reflux of paper. The last operation of this kind performed by the Bank of England, about five years ago, was described by Mr. Alexander Baring, in the House of Commons, in terms which are entitled to the knowledge and remembrance of American citizens. I will read his description, which is brief but impressive. After describing the profuse issues of 1823-24, he painted the reaction in the following terms:

«< They, therefore, all at once, gave a sudden jerk to the horse on whose neck they had before suffered the reins to hang loose. They contracted their issues to a considerable extent. The change was at once felt throughout the country. A few days before that no one knew what to do with his money; now no one knew where to get it. . . . The London bankers found it necessary to follow the same course towards their country correspondents, and these again towards their customers, and each individual towards his debtor. The consequence was obvious in the late panic. Every one desirous to obtain what was due to him ran to his banker, or to any other on whom he had a claim; and even those who had no immediate use for their money took it back and let it lie unemployed in their pockets, thinking it unsafe in others' hands. The effect of this alarm was that houses which were weak went immediately. Then went second-rate houses; and, lastly, houses which were solvent went, because their securities were unavailable. The daily calls to which each individual was subject put it out of his power to assist his neighbor. Men were known to seek for assistance, and that, too, without finding it, who, on examination of their affairs, were proved to be worth £200,000— men, too, who held themselves so secure that if asked six months before whether they could contemplate such an event, they would have said it would be impossible, unless the sky should fall, or some other event equally improbable should occur.»

This is what was done in England five years ago; it is what may be done here in every five years to come, if the bank charter is renewed. Sole dispenser of money, it cannot omit the oldest and most obvious means of amassing wealth by the flux

and reflux of paper. The game will be in its own hands, and the only answer to be given is that to which I have alluded: "The Sultan is too just and merciful to abuse his power."

WR

"THERE IS EAST: THERE IS INDIA»

(From a Speech Delivered in St. Louis in 1849)

E LIVE in extraordinary times and are called upon to elevate ourselves to the grandeur of the occasion. Three and a half centuries ago the great Columbus, the man who afterwards was carried home in chains from the New World which he discovered, this great Columbus, in the year 1492, departed from Europe to arrive in the east by going to the west. It was a sublime conception, he was in the line of success, when the intervention of two continents, not dreamed of before, stopped his progress. Now in the nineteenth century mechanical genius enables his great design to be fulfilled. In the beginning and in barbarous ages, the sea was a barrier to the intercourse of nations. It separated nations. Mechanical genius invented the ship, which converted the barrier into a facility. Then land and continents became an obstruction. The two Americas intervening have prevented Europe and Asia from communicating on a straight line. For three centuries and a half this obstacle has frustrated the grand design of Columbus. Now in our day, mechanical genius has again triumphed over the obstacles of nature and converted into a facility what had so long been an impassable obstacle. The steam car has worked upon the land among enlightened nations to a degree far transcending the miracle which the ship in barbarous ages worked upon the ocean. The land has now become a facility for the most distant communication. A conveyance being invented which annihilated both time and space, we hold the intervening land; we hold the obstacle which stopped Columbus; we are in the line between Europe and Asia; we have it in our power to remove that obstacle; to convert it into a facility to carry him on to this land of promise and of hope with a rapidity and precision and a safety unknown to all ocean navigation. A king and queen started him upon this grand enterprise. It lies in the hands of a republic to complete it. It is in our hands, in the hands of us, the people of the United States, of the first half of the nineteenth century. Let us raise ourselves up.

Let us rise to the grandeur of the occasion. Let us complete the grand design of Columbus by putting Europe and Asia into communication and that to our advantage, through the heart of our country. Let us give to his ships a continued course unknown to all former times. Let us make an iron road, and make it from sea to sea, States and individuals making it east of the Mississippi and the Nation making it west. Let us now, in this convention rise above everything sectional, personal, local. Let us beseech the national legislature to build a great road upon the great national line which unites Europe and Asia-the line which will find on our continent the Bay of San Francisco on one end, St. Louis in the middle, and the great national metropolis and emporium at the other, and which shall be adorned with its crowning honor, the colossal statue of the great Columbus, whose design it accomplishes, hewn from a granite mass of a peak of the Rocky Mountains, the mountain itself the pedestal, and the statue a part of the mountain, pointing with outstretched arm to the western horizon, and saying to the flying passengers, "There is East: there is India!"

ST. BERNARD OF CLAIRVAUX

(1091-1153)

AINT BERNARD is one of the few great orators of the Middle Ages whose eloquence is still self-explanatory. Often, if not generally, in reading addresses, sermons, and homilies translated from Middle Age Latin into modern languages, we wonder what it is in them that could so have moved men as we know they were moved by them. St. Bernard excites no such wonder, but rather moves us first to assent and then to admiration. He is one of the few great orators and writers whose power can be transferred from one language to another. To read ten sentences of one of the sermons in which he preached the twelfth-century Crusade is to be able to understand the otherwise unaccountable enthusiasm he never failed to excite in his hearers. Other orators of the Middle Ages may have been more admired in their time, but Bernard seems more worthy than any of the rest to rank with the great classical and modern masters of eloquence whose utterances are for all time.

He was born in Burgundy in 1091, and at twenty-two joined a small monastery near Citeaux, being even then so eloquent that he persuaded his two elder brothers to give up the military life they had chosen and follow him into the monastery. What is more remarkable, one of them had a wife and children whom he abandoned in leaving the world, and so many others imitated his sacrifice that it is said "mothers hid their sons, wives their husbands, and companions their friends" to prevent them from following Bernard to become monks.

In 1115 he left the monastery at Citeaux and founded a new one at Clairvaux, which soon became famous throughout Europe. The most notable events in his career of remarkable achievement were the controversy in which he worsted Abélard, his support of Pope Innocent II. against the rival pope, Anacletus II., and his 'Preaching the Crusade.' He died August 20th, 1153.