up the work of Jackson, gave emphasis to his fight with the national bank, and compared his work with the work of Cicero, saying that when he destroyed the bank conspiracy he saved America as Cicero had saved Rome by overthrowing the conspiracy of Cataline.

"Wendell Phillips has so well described the danger of allowing private individuals to control the volume of money that I quote from a speech made by him a few years before his death:

"In other words, it was the currency which, rightly arranged, opened a nation's well springs, found work for willing hands to do, and filled them with a just return, while honest capital, daily larger and more secure, ministered to a glad prosperity. Or it was currency, wickedly and selfishly juggled, that made merchants bankrupt and starved labor into discontent and slavery, while capital added house to house and field to field, and gathered into its miserly hands all the wealth left in a ruined land.

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"The first question, therefore, in an industrial nation is: Where ought control of the currency to rest? In whose hands can this almost omnipotent power be trusted? Every writer of political economy, from Aristotle to Adam Smith, allows that a change in the currency alters the price of every ounce and yard of merchandise and every foot of land. Whom can we trust with this despotism? At present the banks and the money kings wield this power. They own the yardstick, and can make it longer or shorter, as they please. They own every pound weight and can make it heavier or lighter, as they choose. This explains the riddle, so mysterious to the common people, that those who trade in money always grow rich, even while those who trade in other things go into bankruptcy.'

"The third objection to national banks of issue is that the moment the national bank is permitted to issue money, that moment it becomes, for pecuniary reasons, the enemy of any government paper.

ness.

"The banks are now urging that the issue of paper money is a function of the banks and that the government ought to go out of the banking busiOur answer is that the issue of money is a function of government and that the banks ought to go out of the governing business. The government can not afford to build up a strong financial interest hostile to the exercise, by the government, of the right to issue and control both the metallic and paper money of the nation.

"Our national bank circulation rests upon government bonds, and

cannot in amount exceed the total sum of bonds outstanding. Hence, if the banks are to supply an increasing amount of currency to meet the needs of increasing population and business, the national debt must perpetually increase."

The whole question ultimately leads to this: Fully twenty-five years ago the governing classes of Europe the creditor class-determined that silver should cease to be money. Within a comparatively short time they were able to stop the coinage of that metal in nearly every mint on the continent. Now their influence has been made effective in the United States-how, a patriotic American blushes even to surmise, especially when he remembers that, despite its great wealth, his is still a debtor nation and the demonetization of silver here means the doubling of their burdens for the toilers who have themselves borrowed money or must pay the heavier share of the public debt. Only the Democracy now stands between the people and the full realization of this crime. The Republican party is now openly committed to the policy of spoliation. Openly and brazenly committed, for it no longer has the excuse of ignorance which has availed to shelter some of their number from the full responsibility for the crime of 1873. Since that event their leaders have confessed.

Mr. McKinley, in a public speech at Toledo, Ohio, as late as February 12, 1891, said:

"During all of Grover Cleveland's years at the head of the government he was dishonoring one of our precious metals, one of our own products, discrediting silver and enhancing the price of gold. He endeavored even before his inauguration to office to stop the coinage of silver dollars, and afterwards and to the end of his administration persistently used his power to that end. He was determined to contract the circulating medium and to demonetize one of the coins of commerce, limit the volume of money among the people, make money scarce, and therefore dear. He would have increased the value of money and diminished the value of everything else-money the master, everything else the servant. He was not thinking of 'the poor' then. He had left 'their side.' He was not standing forth in their defense. Cheap coats, cheap labor, and dear money! The sponsor and promoter of these professing to stand guard over the welfare of the poor and lowly! Was there ever more inconsistency or reckless assumption!"

The Republican party platform in 1892 contained this plank:

"The American people, from tradition and interest, favor bimetallism, and the Republican party demand the use of both gold and silver as a standard money, with such restrictions and under such provisions, to be determined by legislation, as will secure the maintenance of the parity of values of the two metals so that the purchasing and debt-paying power of the dollar, whether silver, gold, or paper, shall be at all times equal. We commend the wise and patriotic steps taken by our government to secure an international conference and adopt such measures as will insure a parity between gold and silver for use as money throughout the world."

The leaders of this same party are now exultingly proclaiming that "the silver question is dead." It is not dead, but if it were, there might be written on its tombstone "Dead in the home of its friends; murdered by the author of it being."

It will be a part of the Democracy's fight in this campaign to prevent such violence to a living issue. As a well known orator recently said: The fight is to be renewed on the same lines and under the same leadership. And now that the Republican party has come out into the open, recanted even its hypocritical professions made at St. Louis, become the open advocate of all the industrial trusts, and made itself the father of the great monetary trust erected by the measures now pending and under consideration-the trust of trusts, which is to crush the lifeblood not out of labor alone, but out of every profession, avocation, and pursuit not allied to itself-who can doubt that the enlightened conscience of the nation will at last triumph over the force and fraud and corruption which before stood in its way and which will be again opposed to its just and humane demands?

CHAPTER IX.

PROGRESSIVE DEMOCRACY

The Democratic party is both conservative and progressive. It is even radical in the sense that it attacks the evils of government at their root. Its platforms and party utterances for a full century have contained the essence of the law and the Constitution. Of the latter instrument it has ever been the only faithful conservator. The progressiveness of the party is proved by the unfailing readiness of the party to apply established truths to new conditions. But from the fundamentals of the truth it has never departed, and never will.

Truth is eternal-always old, ever new. A principle founded on the universal experience of mankind is an infallible rule of conduct for each successive generation.

The Declaration of Independence differs from most national charters in that it asserts not only the rights of country, but the rights of man. Its great author, the founder of the Democratic party, was not merely a patriot, but a lover of his kind; a friend of universal liberty and equal rights. "All men," says his most famous work, "are created equal." Not all Americans merely, but all men. Jefferson, though born in an atmosphere of aristocracy, was an instinctive lover of those whom Lincoln used to call the plain people the people whom he said "the Lord must love because he made so many of them." Jefferson spent several years in France in the cataclysmal period of the Revolu tion, and there he imbibed that hatred of oppression and horror of anarchy which inspired all his subsequent acts and writings.

It is necessary at times to hark back to the remote past, if only to find a fitting rebuke for the dishonesty and charlatanry which characterize the present day politics, especially the politics of the party now in power. A large number of the American people have been born and bred in an atmosphere of political hysteria. They reason, as some cynical philosopher has said, with their stomachs and think with their livers. For years following the Civil War it was enough to defeat any measure, however patriotic or reasonable, on its merits that some demagogue should raise the blatant cry of "Traitor!" As lately as

1880 a famous Republican editor, now dead, made the cynical observation in his newspaper that there was "still one more Republican president in the 'bloody shirt.'"

The "bloody shirt" has ceased to be an important factor in American politics, but the "old flag" is still employed to carry an appropriation or cover a steal. This standard, for example, was very much in evidence ten years ago when the Standard Oil syndicate was seeking a $10,000,000 subsidy in the form of mail contracts for a line of transAtlantic steamers. The syndicate did not seek in vain, and even now the American tax-payer is annually footing the bill; whereas the socalled American line of steamers is probably the most un-American institution that enjoys the shelter of the Stars and Stripes. The "old flag" has been seen within a few months, waved by the same hands with the same outcry and for the same purpose, namely, to induce the taxpayer, under pretense of "restoring the Stars and Stripes to the seas," to heap wealth and favors upon rich ship owners whereby they shall be able to drive all competitors from the ocean. Whether this second patriotic scheme shall succeed or not depends entirely upon whether Mr. McKinley, the candidate of all monopolists, shall be re-elected to the presidency.

The same gallant flag is always employed to defend every scheme of the plutocracy: tariffs, imperialism, militarism, all forms of spoliation. It is made also to discredit in the popular mind whatever reform is intended to check these evils; to restrain special privilege, to take government out of the hands of the few and restore it to the people. The proponents of reform, according to this school of patriotism, are always "traitors," or "cranks."

The cry is not a new one. When Jefferson established free public schools in the colony of Virginia to be supported by general taxation, he was denounced as an "atheist," a "socialist" and a "robber." Education in the colony before this time had been a special privilege for the children of the rich. It was in the hands of the clergy to whom it was a source of handsome profit. So not only the church, but the entire wealthy and exclusive class rose as one man against the reformer who dared to suggest that the rich should be taxed to help pay for the education of the poor. A man of less conscience and less courage than Jefferson would have yielded to this clamor and abandoned the reform. It is largely because Jefferson was not of the weakling type that educa