advancing development made desirable the permanent recording of speech that written language was gradually and haltingly produced. Nature had perfected a universal aerophone over which the transmission and apprehension of sound were of consummate perfection. Man, ages and ages later, made the written sign-picture or letter, which reaches the brain only through the eye. Now, the brainwork required to receive through the eye the purely artificial conventionality of letters and convert them into the sound-conception for which language stands, is enormously greater and more complex than the auricular process which the geological ages have reduced to the last expression of ease.

The ear method of language inter-communication, first in order of historic origin, is infinitely easier to acquire than the eye method; yet in a vast majority of cases language-study is transferred from the first decade of life-stage of development and freshness of ear then combining to make it easy-to the second decade, stage of development and the book method then combining to make it excessively difficult. And this singular inversion of natural order and method involves a second inversion, which is the utterly anachronistic use of grammar. The grammar of a language is a rather interesting thing to read over when you already know the language. A few months of English grammar as we learn it several years after we are entirely familiar with English speech is a very easy episode of the younger school days; but classical grammar, how it has stunted generations and prevented them from learning any classics!

The people to teach languages are not university faculties, but home instructors, who, if they were required, would make children talk in Greek and Latin as fluently at ten as they now speak French and German. It is already common enough in America to find children of eight who, without a suspicion of task, have learned French and German in the nursery. If the reader will chat in either of these tongues with a child so taught, and then attempt to hold similar intercourse with a recent university graduate who attacked his foreign languages as "optionals" at the age of twenty by the eye, he will promptly see that out of the mouths of babes and sucklings will come something facile, idiomatic, and free, while the collegian falters and wounds the patient atmosphere with the melancholy wreckage of his parts of speech. What is true of modern tongues is equally true of Greek, which some dolts still call a dead language. In two generations it would be possible to have every well-educated child speak

French, German, and Greek or Latin by the age of ten, and that without weariness. Plenty of Russian children do quite as much now. If the desired languages were really learned by ten, or before they are now ordinarily begun, consider the freedom and time that higher schools and universities would have in the following decade to teach the structure and genius of language and the real riches of literature, which now they cannot dream of doing. The putting youths of fifteen to work at learning a language is like putting them to bite on a rubber ring.

Science shares the same fate, and much of its education is utterly out of time. As the ear is most sensitive to sound in childhood, so in early years the eye is more freshly alive to color, which is the basis of vision. In the first decade scientific observation should be taught with all its highest subtlety, all its richest intricacy. By twelve every child should possess a trained sensorium and be an accurate scientific observer. College faculties are abundantly familiar with the sort of youth who comes to enter the vestibule of science with a sensorium grown hopelessly dull and insensitive for the want of early use. It would be easy to multiply instances of the educational violation of nature. Our teaching of mathematics is a capital one. Mental economics are all on the side of following nature, and I believe it is no exaggeration to say that, in an education recast to harmonize with the real character of the human mind, fully half of the university work could be done in the first decade far better than the college faculties ever have done or ever will do it. The time will come when a university will no more have a teacher of French than it will have a class in teething.

Whence must education derive the exact knowledge which is to form the organic basis for the new round training of man? Out of the pedagogic past or present? Never! It will come out of biology and psychology. It will be the magnificent gift of science.

3

CLARENCE KING.

WOULD FREE COINAGE BRING EUROPEAN SILVER

HERE?

Ir is not my intention at this time to enter upon a general discussion of the silver question, but to confine myself to the one phase of the subject embodied in my query, Preliminary, however, to an intelligent answer to the query, it is necessary to make clear exactly what is meant by free silver coinage here, and briefly to consider the changes which have taken place in respect to silver since the United States adopted the gold standard in 1873. Free silver coinage may be defined as the right of any one to deposit silver at any mint of the United States and have every 371 grains of pure silver (now worth about 70 cents) stamped, free of charge, into a dollar, which shall be a full legal tender at its face value in the payment of debts and obligations of all kinds in the United States.

Under free coinage proper the conversion of silver into dollars would be limited to the capacity of our mints, say from three to four million pieces a month. In order, however, to hasten the "benefits" of free coinage, all the measures advocated by the silver men provide for the instantaneous conversion of silver bullion into legal dollars by purchase by the government at our coining rate. Free silver coinage as proposed, therefore, means this: that the United States shall pay $1.2929 an ounce (now worth 90 cents an ounce) for all the silver which may be brought to our mints, in legal-tender money, interconvertible under existing law with gold at par.

The important changes which have taken place in respect to silver since 1873 may be enumerated as follows: 1. Silver has depreciated in value, as measured by gold, over 30 per cent-from $1.33 an ounce in 1873 to 90 cents in 1892. 2. European nations have for fourteen years discontinued the coinage of full legal-tender silver money. 3. The exchanges of the world are to-day settled everywhere in gold, or, if in silver, at its gold value. 4. The product of silver has considerably more than doubled-63,000,000 ounces in 1873 against 140,000,000 ounces in 1891.

Such being the proposed legislation and such the existing condi

tions, the question recurs, What would be the results of such legislation? One result-and the one which at the present time carries the most deterrent force with it-is that we should be flooded with the world's silver. That the annual product of domestic as well as foreign. silver would find its way to our open mints under free coinage here, so long as we could maintain the price in gold, is very generally conceded.

How about foreign silver coins? According to a table which I have just presented to the Committee on Coinage, Weights, and Measures of the House of Representatives, a table compiled from the latest official and other reliable data, the stock of silver in the principal countries of the world, exclusive of the United States, approximates $3,397,000,000, of which $2,930,000,000 are full legal-tender coin and $467,000,000 subsidiary or limited-tender coin. The actual commercial value of the silver contained in these coins is from 30 to 40 per cent less than the face value, and, except in countries where the silver coins are interconvertible with gold coins, the actual purchasing value of these coins as compared with gold has depreciated to the same extent.

The stock of full legal-tender silver coins (not taking into account any subsidiary or divisional coins) in the principal countries of Europe approximates $1,100,000,000, of which some $430,000,000 are stored in the vaults of five banking-houses. It is believed that if the United States should pass an act for the free coinage of silver, this stock of silver would very largely be deposited at our mints for payment in legal-tender money interconvertible with gold. On the other hand, it is urged that this would not take place for two reasons: first, because the silver coins of Europe are now in use for monetary purposes at their nominal value; and secondly, because such an exchange would entail a loss of between three and four per cent upon the owners of such coin, equivalent to the difference between our coining rate and the European coining rate of silver, together with cost of shipment and insurance.

An advocate of free coinage at the recent convention of bankers held at New Orleans, said:

"As to Europe's great banks, they are chartered institutions, and may not coin money. One of their functions is to earn it; no one of them is to lose money intentionally. Their silver reserves and their gold reserves are exactly alike— full legal-tender in fulfilment of contracts, payment of debts including their deposits, and for redemption of their circulating notes. For these banks to employ our reopened mints as the medium of exchanging their legal-tender silver for its

exact equivalent, to them, in gold, would occasion them a loss exceeding $13,000,000, besides the cost of freight, insurance, interest, and light weight of coin in the transfer of bullion to and from our mints."1

A moment's reflection will show the fallacy of this reasoning, based as it is on the assumption that the passage of a free-coinage law by the United States, and the actual free coinage of silver here, would effect the rehabilitation of silver.

In the first place, it may be truthfully said that there is not a statesman or financier in Europe-not even the most ardent champion of bi-metallism—who believes that the adoption of the policy of free coinage of silver by the United States would permanently raise the price of that metal and keep it at $1.2929 per fine ounce in gold. On the contrary, the very general belief in Europe is that it would have that effect only for a very short time, beginning with the passage of the free-coinage measure, after which the price of silver, unless other commercial nations followed the example of the United States and opened their mints to the free coinage of silver (a thing in the highest degree improbable), would steadily decline.

On this subject Mr. G. M. Boissevain, who wrote the splendid essay on bi-metallism which obtained the prize offered by Sir H. M. MeyseyThompson, Bart., at the Paris Monetary Conference of 1889, says:

"Lastly, in the third place, I reply-and this especially is of very great importance that nothing but international bi-metallism can assure the stability of the ratio of value between the two metals, nor re-establish the unity of the money standard in the commercial world. Indeed, from this point of view, i.e., having regard to the unity of the monetary standard, I consider that if the United States should really adopt the silver standard it would be a new cause of embarrassment for Europe, and that its trade would sensibly suffer."

The same distinguished champion of international bi-metallism says in the same connection:

"And secondly, another thing must be kept in view, namely, that only the triumph of bi-metallism can put a definite end to the possibility of fresh demonetizations of silver in Europe. The countries which are at present under the régime of the étalon boiteux' will not be able in the long run to abstain from such demonetizations unless the two metals really again take rank in the monetary circulation on a footing of perfect equality. Whatever be the ratio of value between the two metals which results in the end from the monetary policy of the United States, so long as the commercial world is divided into two parts, coun

1 "The Bankers' Magazine," April, 1891, p. 794.

? That is to say, countries which, though using both gold and silver as unlimited legal-tender money at a fixed ratio, have been obliged to restrict the mintage of silver, e.g., France.