suggestion of the repudiation of debts, public or private, must be rebuked by all men who believe that honesty is the best policy, or who love their country and would preserve unsullied its National honor.

SECTIONALISM ALMOST OBLITERATED.

The country is to be congratulated upon the almost total obliteration of the sectional lines which for so many years marked the division of the United States into slave and free territory, and finally threatened its partition into two separate governments by the dread ordeal of civil war. The era of reconciliation, so long and earnestly desired by General GRANT and many other great leaders, North and South, has happily come, and the feeling of distrust and hostility between the sections is everywhere vanishing, let us hope never to return. Nothing is better calculated to give strength to the Nation at home, increase our power and influence abroad, and add to the permanency and security of our free institutions, than the restoration of cordial relations between the people of all sections and parts of our beloved country. If called by the suffrages of the people to assume the duties of the high office of President of the United States, I shall count it a privilege to aid, even in the slightest degree, in the promotion of the spirit of fraternal regard which should animate and govern the citizens of every section, State, or part of the Republic. After the lapse of a century since its utterance, let us, at length, and forever hereafter, heed the admonition of WASHINGTON : "There should be no North, no South, no East, no West-but a common country." It shall be my constant aim to improve every opportunity to advance the cause of good government by promoting that spirit of forbearance and justice which is so essential to our prosperity and happiness by joining most heartily in all proper efforts to restore the relations of brotherly respect and affection which in our early history characterized all the people of all the States. I would be glad to contribute towards binding in indivisible union the different divisions of the country, which, indeed, now "have every inducement of sympathy and interest" to weld them together more strongly than ever. I would rejoice to see demonstrated to the world, that the North and the South and the East and the West are not separated, or in danger of becoming separated, because of sectional or party differences. The war is long since over; "we are not enemies, but friends," and as friends we will faithfully and cordially co-operate, under the approving smile of Him who has thus far so signally sustained and guided us, to preserve inviolate our country's name and honor, its peace and good order, and its continued ascendency among the greatest governments on earth.

Very respectfully, your obedient servant,

WILLIAM MCKINLEY.

MR. HOBART'S LETTER OF ACCEPTANCE.

PATERSON, N. J., Sept. 9, 1896. Hon. CHARLES W. FAIRBANKS, and others, of the Notification Committee of the Republican National Convention.

GENTLEMEN: I have already, in accepting the nomination for the office of the VicePresidency, tendered me by the National Republican Convention, expressed my approval of the platform adopted by that body as the party basis of doctrine. In accordance with accepted usage I beg now to supplement that brief statement of my views by some additional reflections upon the questions which are in debate before the American people.

The platform declarations in reference to the money question express clearly and unmistakably the attitude of the Republican Party as to this supremely important subject. We stand unqualifiedly for honesty in finance and the permanent adjustment of our monetary system, in the multifarious activities of trade and commerce, to the existing gold standard of value. We hold that every dollar of currency issued by the United States, whether of gold, silver or paper, must be worth a dollar in gold, whether in the pocket of the man who toils for his daily bread, in the vault of the savings-bank which holds his deposits, or in the exchanges of the world.

The money standard of a great nation should be as fixed and permanent as the nation itself. To secure and retain the best should be the desire of every rightminded citizen. Resting on stable foundations, continuous and unvarying certainty of value should be its distinguishing characteristic. The experience of all history confirms the truth that every coin, made under any law, howsoever that coin may be stamped, will finally command in the markets of the world the exact value of the materials which compose it. The dollar of our country, whether of gold or silver,

should be of the full value of one hundred cents, and by so much as any dollar is worth less than this in the market, by precisely that sum will some one be defrauded.

GOLD THE FINAL STANDARD.

The necessity of a certain and fixed money value between nations as well as individuals has grown out of the interchange of commodities, the trade and business relationships which have arisen among the peoples of the world, with the enlargement of human wants and the broadening of human interests. This necessity has made gold the final standard of all enlightened nations. Other metals, including silver, have a recognized commercial value, and silver especially has a value of great importance for subsidiary coinage. In view of a sedulous effort by the advocates of free coinage to create a contrary impression, it cannot be too strongly emphasized that the Republican Party in its platform affirms this value in silver, and favors the largest possible use of this metal as actual money that can be maintained with safety. Not only this, it will not antagonize, but will gladly assist in promoting a double standard whenever it can be secured by agreement and co-operation among the nations. The bimetallic currency, involving the free use of silver, which we now have, is cordially approved by Republicans. But a standard and a currency are vastly different things.

If we are to continue to hold our place among the great commercial nations, we must cease juggling with this question and make our honesty of purpose clear to the world. No room should be left for misconception as to the meaning of the language used in the bonds of the Government not yet matured. It should not be possible for any party or individual to raise a question as to the purpose of the country to pay all its obligations in the best form of money recognized by the commercial world. Any nation which is worthy of credit or confidence can afford to say explicitly on a question so vital to every interest what it means, when such meaning is challenged or doubted. It is desirable that we should make it known at once and authoritatively that an honest dollar " means any dollar equivalent to a gold dollar of the present standard of weight and fineness. The world should likewise be assured that the standard dollar of America is as inflexible a quantity as the French Napoleon, the British sovereign, or the German 20-mark piece.

66

CONSEQUENCES OF FREE-SILVER COINAGE.

The free coinage of silver at the ratio of 16 to 1 is a policy which no nation has ever before proposed, and it is not to-day permitted in any mint in the world-not even in Mexico. It is purposed to make the coinage unlimited, at an absolutely fictitious ratio, fixed with no reference to intrinsic value or pledge of ultimate redemption. With silver at its present price of less than 70 cents per ounce in the market, such a policy means an immediate profit to the seller of silver, for which there is no return now or hereafter to the people or the Government. It means that for each dollar's worth of silver bullion delivered at the mint, practically $2 of stamped coin will be given in exchange. For $100 worth of bullion nearly two hundred silver dollars will be delivered.

Let it also be remembered that the consequences of such an act would probably be cumulative in their effects. The crop of silver, unlike that of hay, or wheat, or cornwhich, being of yearly production, can be regulated by the law of demand and supply-is fixed once for all. The silver which has not yet been gathered is all in the ground. Dearth or other accident of the elements cannot augment or diminish it. Is it not more than probable that with the enormous premium offered for its mining the cupidity of man would make an over-supply continuous, with the necessary result of a steady depreciation as long as the silver dollar could be kept in circulation at all? Under the laws of finance, which are as fixed as those of any other science, the inevitable result would finally be a currency all and absolutely fiat. There is no difference in principle between the dollar half fiat and one all fiat. The latter, as the cheapest, under the logic of "cheap money," would surely drive the other out.

Any attempt on the part of the Government to create by its fiat money of a fictitious value would dishonor us in the eyes of other people and bring infinite reproach upon the National character. The business and financial consequences of such an immoral act would be worldwide, because our commercial relations are worldwide. All our settlements with other lands must be made, not with the money which may be current in our own country, but in gold, the standard of all nations with which our relations are most cordial and extensive, and no legislative enactment can free us from that inevitable necessity. It is a known fact that more than 80 per cent. of the commerce of the world is settled in gold on a gold basis.

DISCRIMINATING AGAINST PRODUCERS.

Such free-coinage legislation, if ever consummated, would discriminate against every producer of wheat, cotton, corn or rye—who should in justice be equally

entitled, with the silver-owner, to sell his products to the United States Treasury, at a profit fixed by the Government-and against all producers of iron, steel, zinc or copper, who might properly claim to have their metals made into current coin. It would, as well, be a fraud upon all persons forced to accept a currency thus stimulated and at the same time degraded.

In every aspect the proposed policy is partial and one-sided, because it is only when a profit can be made by a mine-owner or dealer that he takes his silver to the mint for coinage. The Government is always at the losing end. Stamp such fictitious value upon silver ore, and a dishonest and unjust discrimination will be made against every other form of industry. When silver bullion worth a little more than 50 cents is made into a legal-tender dollar, driving out one having a purchasing and debt-paying power of 100 cents, it will clearly be done at the expense and injury of every class of the community.

Those who contend for the free and unlimited coinage of silver may believe in all honesty that while the present ratio of silver to gold is as 30 to 1 (not 16 to 1), silver will rise above the existing market value. If it does so rise the effect will be to make the loss to all the people so much less, but such an opinion is but a hazardous conjecture at best, and is not justified by experience. Within the last twenty years this Government has bought about 460,000,000 of ounces of silver, from which it has coined approximately 430,000,000 of silver dollars and issued 130,000,000 of dollars in silver certificates, and the price of the metal has steadily declined from $1.15 per ounce to 68 cents per ounce. What will be the decline when the supply is augmented by the offerings of all the world? The loss upon these silver purchases to the people of this country has now been nearly $150,000,000.

The dollar of our fathers, about which so much is said, was an honest dollar, silver maintaining a full parity of intrinsic value with gold. The fathers would have spurned and ridiculed a proposition to make a silver dollar worth only 53 cents stand of equal value with a gold one worth 100 cents. The experience of all nations proves that any depreciation, however slight, of another standard from the parity with gold has driven the more valuable one out of circulation, and such experience in a matter of this kind is worth much more than mere interested speculative opinion. The fact that few gold coins are seen in ordinary circulation for domestic uses is no proof at all that the metal is not performing a most important function in business affairs. The foundation of the house is not always in sight, but the house would not stand an hour if there were no foundation. The great enginery that moves the ocean steamship is not always in view of the passenger, but it is, all the same, the propelling force of the vessel, without which it would soon become a worthless derelict.

A GREAT CALAMITY THREATENED.

It may be instructive to consider a moment how the free and unlimited coinage of silver would affect a few great interests, and I mention only enough to demonstrate what a calamity may lie before us if the platform formulated at Chicago is permitted to be carried out.

There are now on deposit in the savings banks of thirty-three States and Territories of this Union the vast sum of $2,000,000,000. These are the savings of almost 5,000,000 depositors. In many cases they represent the labor and economies of years. Any depreciation in the value of the dollar would defraud every man, woman, and child to whom these savings belong. Every dollar of their earnings when deposited was worth 100 cents in gold of the present standard of weight and fineness. Are they not entitled to receive in full, with interest, all they have so deposited? Any legislation that would reduce it by the value of a single dime would be an intolerable wrong to each depositor. Every bank or banker who has accepted the earnings of these millions of dollars to the credit of our citizens must be required to pay them back in money not one whit less valuable than that which these banks and bankers received in trust.

There are in this country nearly 6,000 building and loan associations, with shareholders to the number of 1,800,000 and with assets amounting to more than $500,000,000. Their average of holdings is nearly $300 per capita, and in many cases they represent the savings of men and women who have denied themselves the comforts of life in the hope of being able to accumulate enough to buy or build homes of their own. They have aided in the erection of over 1,000,000 houses, which are now affording comfort and shelter for 5,000,000 of our thrifty people.

CONFISCATION OF SAVINGS.

Free coinage at the arbitrary rate of sixteen ounces of silver to one of gold would be equivalent to the confiscation of nearly half the savings that these people have invested. It would be tantamount to a war upon American homemakers. It would be an invasion of the homes of the provident," and tend directly to " destroy the

stimulus to endeavor and the compensation of honest toil." Every one of the shareholders of these associations is entitled to be repaid in money of the same value which he deposited by weekly payments or otherwise in these companies. No one of them should be made homeless because a political party demands a change in the money standard of our country as an experiment or as a concession to selfishness or greed.

The magnitude of the disaster which would overtake these and cognate interests becomes the more strikingly apparent when considered in the aggregate. Stated broadly, the savings banks, life insurance and assessment companies and building loan associations of the country hold in trust $15,309,717,381. The debasement of the currency to a silver basis, as proposed by the Chicago platform, would wipe out at one blow approximately $7,963,504,856 of this aggregate. According to the report of the Department of Agriculture, the total value of the main cereal crops in this country in 1894 was $995,438,107. So that the total sum belonging to the people and held in trust in these institutions which would be obliterated by the triumph of free and unlimited silver coinage, would be seven and one-half times the total value of the annual cereal crop of the United States. The total value of the manufactured products of the country for the census year of 1890 was $9,372,537,283. The establishment of a silver basis of value, as now proposed, would entail a loss to these three interests alone equal to 85 per cent. of this enormous output of all the manufacturing industries of the Union, and would affect directly nearly one-third of its whole population.

AN INSULT TO THE VETERANS.

One hundred and forty millions of dollars per annum are due to the pensioners of the late war. That sum represents blood spilled and sufferings endured in order to preserve this Nation from disintegration. In many cases the sums so paid in pensions are exceedingly small; in few, if any, are they excessive. The spirit that would deplete these to the extent of a farthing is the same that would organize sedition, destroy the peace and security of the country, punish rather than reward our veteran soldiers, and is unworthy of the countenance, by thought or vote, of any patriotic citizen of whatever political faith. No party, until that which met in convention at Chicago, has ever ventured to insult the honored survivors of our struggle for the National life by proposing to scale their pensions horizontally, and to pay them hereafter in depreciated dollars worth only 53 cents each.

The amounts due, in addition to the interests already named, to depositors and trust companies in National, State and private banks, to holders of fire and accident insurance policies, to holders of industrial insurance, where the money deposited or the premiums have been paid in gold or its equivalent, are so enormous, together with the sums due, and to become due, for State, municipal, county or other corporate debts, that if paid in depreciated silver or its equivalent, it would not only entail upon our fellow-countrymen a loss in money which has not been equalled in a similar experience since the world began, but it would, at the same time, bring a disgrace to our country such as has never befallen any other nation which had the ability to pay its honest debts. In our condition, and considering our magnificent capacity for raising revenue, such wholesale repudiation is without necessity or excuse. No political expediency or party exigency, however pressing, could justify so monstrous an act.

All these deposits and debts must, under the platform of the Republican party, be met and adjusted in the best currency the world knows, and measured by the same standard in which the debts have been contracted or the deposits or payments have been made.

Still dealing sparingly with figures, of which there is an enormous mass to sustain the position of the advocates of the gold standard of value, I cite one more fact, which is officially established, premised by the truism that there is no better test of the growth of the country's prosperity than its increase in the per capita holdings of its population. In the decade between 1880 and 1890, during which we had our existing gold standard, and were under the conditions that supervened from the act of 1873, the per capita ownings of this country increased from $870 to $1,036. In those ten years the aggregate increase of the wealth of our country was $21,395,000,000, being 50 per cent. in excess of the increase for any previous 10 years since 1850, and at the amazing rate of over $2,000,000,000 a year. The framers of the Chicago platform in the face of this fact, and of the enormous increase over Great Britain, during this same gold-standard decade, of our country's foreign trade and its production of iron, coal, and other great symbols of National strength and progress, assert that our monetary standard is "not only un-American, but anti-American, "and that it has brought us "into financial servitude to London." It is impossible to imagine an assertion more reckless and indefensible.

THE ONLY LOGICAL CONCLUSION.

The proposition for free and unlimited silver coinage, carried to its logical conclusion-and but one is possible-means, as before intimated, legislative warrant for the

repudiation of all existing indebtedness, public and private, to the extent of nearly 50 per cent. of the face of all such indebtedness. It demands an unlimited volume of fiat currency, irredeemable, and therefore without any standard value in the markets of the world. Every consideration of public interest and public honor demands that this proposition should be rejected by the American people.

It must

This country cannot afford to give its sanction to wholesale spoliation. hold fast to its integrity. It must still encourage thrift in all proper ways. It must not only educate its children to honor and respect the Flag, but it should inculcate fidelity to the obligations of personal and national honor as well. Both these great principles should hereafter be taught in the common schools of the land, and the lesson impressed upon those who are the voters of to-day and those who are to become the inheritors of sovereign power in the Republic, that it is neither wise, patriotic, nor safe to make political platforms the mediums of assault upon property, the peace of society and upon civilization itself.

PUTTING A PREMIUM ON DISHONESTY.

Until these lessons have been learned by our children, and by those who have reached the voting age, it can only be surmised what enlightened statesmen and political economists will record, as to the action of a party convention which offers an inducement to National dishonesty by a premium of 47 cents for every 53 cents' worth of silver that can be extracted from the bowels of the whole earth, with a cordial invitation to all to produce it at our mints and accept for it a full silver legal-tender dollar of one hundred cents rated value, to be coined free of charge and unlimited in quantity for private account.

But vastly more than a mere assertion of a purpose to reconstruct the National currency is suggested by the Chicago platform. It assumes, in fact, the form of a revolutionary propaganda. It embodies a menace of National disintegration and destruction. This spirit manifested itself in a deliberate proposition to repudiate the plighted public faith, to impair the sanctity of the obligation of private contracts, to cripple the credit of the Nation by stripping the Government of the power to borrow money as the urgent exigencies of the Treasury may require, and, in a word, to overthrow all the foundations of financial and industrial stability.

Nor is this all. Not content with a proposition to thus debauch the currency and to unsettle all conditions of trade and commerce, the party responsible for this platform denies the competency of the Government to protect the lives and property of its citizens against internal disorder and violence.

THE ASSAULT ON THE SUPREME COURT.

It assails the judicial muniments reared by the Constitution for the defence of individual rights and the public welfare, and it even threatens to destroy the integrity and independence of the Supreme Court, which has been considered the last refuge of the citizen against every form of outrage and injustice.

In the face of the serious peril which these propositions embody, it would seem that there could be but one sentiment among right-thinking citizens as to the duty of the hour. All men of whatever party, who believe in law, and have some regard for the sacredness of individual and institutional rights, must unite in defence of the endangered interests of the Nation.

While the financial issue which has been thus considered, and which has come, as the result of the agitation of recent years, to occupy a peculiar conspicuousness, is admittedly of primary importance, there is another question which must command careful and serious attention. Our financial and business condition is at this moment one of almost unprecedented depression. Our great industrial system is seriously paralyzed. Production in many important branches of manufacture has altogether ceased. Capital is without remunerative employment. Labor is idle. The revenues of the Government are insufficient to meet its ordinary and necessary expenses. These conditions are not the result of accident. They are the outcome of a mistaken economic policy deliberately enacted and applied. It would not be difficult, and would not involve any violent disturbance of our existing commercial system, to enact necessary tariff modifications along the lines of experience.

TARIFF POLICIES CONTRASTED.

For the first two fiscal years of the so-called McKinley Tariff, the receipts from customs were $380,807,980. At this writing the Wilson Tariff act has been in force for nearly two full fiscal years; but the total receipts, actual and estimated, cannot exceed $312,441,947. A steady deficit, constantly depleting the resources of the Government and trenching even upon its gold reserve, has brought about public distrust and business disaster. It has, too, necessitated the sale of $262,000,000 of bonds, thereby increasing to that extent the National debt. It will be remembered that in no year of the more than a quarter of a century of continuous Republican Administration suc