expressed, Mr. Bayard says, are his opinions, "formed by me after careful deliberation." He adds ominously that "when Congress shall have concluded its action on the subject, it is possible that I may desire to submit a further statement." The speech itself is then printed at length, filling eight columns of the Record. That comes under date London, December 12, but is only the beginning. Under date of January 3 a cable despatch was sent by Olney to Bayard saying that the House wanted information about an earlier speech, which referred to the President as one who "stood in the midst of a strong, self-confident, and oftentimes violent people-men who sought to have their own way." The speech referred to, Mr. Bayard says, was delivered at the opening of the Boston Grammar School in August last. He tells what the Boston Grammar School is, and how he was invited to attend the opening exercises, and how he joined the others in a dinner after the exercises, where toasts were given and responded to extemporaneously, he being one of the responders. Then he encloses a newspaper containing a report of the whole proceedings, including a list of the scholars who took prizes, reports of the examinations in the classics and mathe

matics, all the speeches, including his own, to the extent of fourteen columns of the Record. We hope that the House will derive profit from this report. By giving their entire time to it for the remainder of the session they would relieve the country very much.

ried for any wild scheme. Not only has it lost its old hold upon the public, but it is regarded with a growing contempt.

Mr. Sewell of New Jersey is one of the last members of the Senate from whom the country is wont to expect either the presentation of a notable proposition or an argument that deserves attention. But the anti-Jingo resolution which he introduced a fortnight ago was striking in itself, and it was supported last week in a speech that was full of good sense and sound reasoning. The New Jersey Senator began by tracing the origin of the Monroe Doctrine and setting forth the limitations that were then put upon it, in contrast with the attempts now made to extend it over half the globe. He pointed out that the position taken by the President and the Secretary of State in the Venezuelan matter "practically means that this Government must assume a protectorate over Mexico, Central America, and all the South American states, and that, no matter whether these states be right or wrong, in any case of a conflict with a European Power we pledge ourselves as an ally to furnish men and munitions of war, and force enough to protect the weaker American Power against the stronger European Power." What such a policy would mean in the case of Venezuela he shrewdly showed by quoting the remark of Mr. Olney in his correspondence, that "in 1848 Venezuela entered upon a period of civil commotions, which lasted for more than a quarter of a century, and the negotiations thus interrupted in 1844 were not resumed until 1876."

The closing passages of Mr. Sewell's speech were rendered particularly noteworthy by the fact that he showed some perception of the condition of the country, and of the folly of unnecessarily precipitating an international controversy now— and such an attitude of mind has unhappily become a rarity in the Senate. He expressed his conviction that a matter which has been slumbering so many years in a state of diplomatic repose might have been delayed at least a few months longer, and reminded his colleagues that "if we address ourselves to the proper ordering of our domestic economies, we have quite enough now to engage our full time, and upon which to exert our best mental ener

The two Senators from the new State of Utah were sworn in on Monday, and the seats in the upper branch are now all filled, except one from Delaware, which will doubtless soon be awarded to the Republican claimant. The full Senate now consists of ninety members-almost twice as many as sixty years ago, and one-third more than at the outbreak of the civil war, while almost one-sixth have come in during the last half-dozen years. The Senate was never so large a body as now, and it never stood lower in the public esteem. The most striking feature in the development of Congress during the past quarter of a century, and particularly during the last ten years, has been the steady and of late rapid decline in the Senate, as compared both with its own past and with the House of Representa-gies." While believing that the executives at the present time. Until a comparatively recent period, the upper branch of Congress maintained to a great extent its ancient hold upon the public mind as a far more dignified, conservative, and able body than the House-a body which could be trusted to resist a popular craze, as in 1868 it defeated the wild scheme for deposing Andrew Johnson through an abuse of the impeachment power. This position has now been entirely forfeited. The Senate to-day is a less conservative body than the House, and it is more easily car

tive ought to uphold the honor of the nation, he holds that "we have a right to expect that discretion and good judgment will be exercised in bringing to a culmination an issue so grave and serious as that now presented," and he pronounced the President's action "in this respect alike unseasonable and premature," in view of the facts that the country is yet "in a state of convalescence from the financial malady of 1893," and that "the still unsettled and troublous condition of its financial affairs is too strongly in evidence

to warrant the putting of any further unnecessary strain upon it." In short, Mr. Sewell's speech was full of words of truth and soberness. The wonder is that the Shermans and Morrills and other veterans of the Senate should have left the utterance of such words to a member whose standing does not lend them the added weight that they would receive coming from a leader of national reputation and influence.

Senator Frye of Maine is a nice man to make an uproar about the Armenian massacres. He is the calm, sensible legislator who expressed his regret that Spain apologized for the Alliança incident. War for war's sake has no warmer friend, and war produces every where the state of things which we are deploring in Armenia. It makes widows and orphans by the thousand; it destroys towns, cities, and villages, and spreads famine and pestilence and destroys crops, and in fact reduces the seat of operations to the condition in which Armenia is to-day. Part of the reluctance of the Powers to tackle the Turk is due to the dread of reducing large regions of Europe to a similar condition. This is not an unworthy fear. Of course it is a reproach to our civilization that there should be any occasion for it-that the Powers should not be able to agree to abate the terrible nuisance known as Turkey without falling out among themselves; but we who are afraid that an agreement between Great Britain and Venezuela about a boundary line may endanger our institutions, are hardly in a position to find fault with them. Every country contains its Jingoes, and there is nothing like the Jingo imagination for detecting danger from foreign machinations. If the Powers had one-quarter the suspicion of each other that an American Jingo has of Great Britain, they would be fighting like demons all the time. The way our Senate is going on just now, without either army or navy, gives one, we fear, but a faint idea of the way it would go on in meddling, threatening, and "claiming" if it had the great navy which so many of us are longing for. Fancy such an instrument of destruction in the hands of men like Senators Frye and Morgan and Davis. The true responsibility for what is happening in Armenia rests with Russia and Germany — with Russia for not offering to restore order in Armenia under a "mandate," as the French did in Greece in 1828, and in Syria in 1860, and Austria in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1877; and Germany for not sustaining England in the recent demonstrations. The notion that we can apply pressure to the Porte which England cannot or will not apply, is one of the whimsies of the day.

The Boston Herald says:

"Some of the greatest men of our country have had this habit of drinking heavily-it has gone into history as a weakness in their cha

THE "DOCTRINE.”

Now that we are nearing the close of the Jingo craze, it is impossible for the calm observer to avoid the conclusion that it owed much of its gravity and extent to the fashion of calling the policy recommended by President Monroe by the name of "doctrine." When it was first called a "doctrine," we are not yet able to say with positiveness, but it was apparently long after 1823. The expression was not used during the discussion in Congress of a proposition to send delegates to the Panama Congress in 1826, which involved frequent references to Mr. Monroe's statement. A passage in a speech of Daniel Webster's made on April 14, in the course of that debate, shows that the term "doctrine" had not then become fixed, and that there was in Mr. Webster's mind, and probably in that of the public, a clear appreciation of the fact that President Monroe was not teaching a doctrine, but was making a declaration of policy with regard to our own interests exclusively, when he issued his celebrated message. Here it is, and we have italicized the expressions which confirm our view: "It is, doubtless, true, as I took occasion to observe the other day, that this declaration must be considered as founded on our rights, and to spring mainly from a regard to their preservation. It did not commit us, at all events, to take up arms on any indication of hostile feeling by the Powers of Europe towards South America. If, for example, all the States of Europe had refused to trade with South America until her states should return to their former allegiance, that would have furnished no cause of interference to us. Or, if an armament bad been furnished by the Allies to act against provinces the most remote from us, as Chili or Buenos Ayres, the distance of the scene of action, diminishing our apprehension of danger, and diminishing, also, our means of effectual interposition, might still have left us to content ourselves with remonstrance. But a very different case would have arisen if an army, equipped and maintained by these

Powers, had been landed on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, and commenced the war in our own immediate neighborhood. Such an event might justly be regarded as dangerous to ourselves, and, on that ground, to have called for decided and immediate interference by us. The sentiments and the policy announced by the declaration thus understood were, therefore, in strict conformity to our duties and our interests."

In 1848 President Polk sent to Congress a message, regarding affairs in Yucatan, which provoked a debate that involved frequent references to Mr. Monroe's position, and in this debate we find the expression "doctrine" used more than once. "The President," said Mr. Holmes of South Carolina, "had taken the opportunity of reiterating a doctrine which was said to be the doctrine of Mr. Monroe; and there never was a more inappropriate time for the assertion of that doctrine, even if it did apply." Mr. Bagby of Alabama "did not think that the doctrine contained in the declaration of Mr. Monroe either sanctioned or discountenanced this measure." But even at that time doctrine was not universally accepted as the proper term, and Mr. Root of New York referred to an assertion that "Mr. Monroe had committed us by his

declaration in 1823." Whether called a declaration or a doctrine, it had not yet acquired the sacroscant character now ascribed to it. Mr. Root declared that Mr. Monroe had no authority to commit succeeding generations by his declaration, and even went so far as flippantly to remark: "It was sometimes very convenient, when gentlemen had a point to carry, to resort to some of Mr. Monroe's old musty letters."

At all events, "doctrine" is an unfortunate term-in the first place, because it is not strictly descriptive. But the second objection to it is more serious. It is that the term fell among a people bred in theological discussion, and accustomed to use doctrine as a term of mystery and divine authority. Webster gives various definitions of it, such as "teaching," "instruction," like "Christ's doctrine," or "a body of principles of faith," like the "doctrine of atoms," or "the doctrine of gravitation," or "the doctrines of the Bible." He mentions the Monroe Doctrine, but he gives no definition of "doctrine" which will cover Monroe's recommendation. In fact, in popular use, both in Monroe's time and down to our own day, a doctrine was something with superhuman authority behind it, and which could not be approached from a purely mundane point of view. To the ordinary "plain American," a doctrine is something different from, and much more serious than, an opinion, or theory, or recommendation; something to be handled more reverently and to be accepted with less question. He finds it difficult to believe, therefore, that Monroe's advice to interfere in the affairs of the Spanish-American states if they are attacked by a European Power is a piece of political advice, to be examined (like every other) as a piece of policy with reference to time, place and circumstances, and probable result.

66

If any one doubts this, we advise him to make an experiment with any of his older neighbors by propounding to him, for acceptance, separately and apart from the others, any one of the developments" of the Monroe Doctrine to be found in Secretary Olney's despatch of July 20, for example. Ask him whether, when a community of "yellow-bellied Dagoes" down there quarrels with a European Power, we ought to take it for granted that the European Power is in the wrong and the Dagoes in the right; or whether the Dagoes ought to be allowed to choose a European arbitrator in any of their quarrels; or whether a Dago ought to be allowed to accept the boundary claim of a European colony to his own detriment, or to enter into an alliance with a European Power against one of his sister republics; whether the Dago states, Chili or Peru, for example, by "natural sympathy, by similarity of governmental institution,' were "our natural friends and allies, commercially and politically," more so than Eng

land; whether we were "practically sovereign on this continent and our fiat law" in any matter about which we choose to concern ourselves. Ask him these questions without letting him perceive your object, and he will undoubtedly laugh a merry laugh, and ask you for whom you take him, or request you "to give him an easier one." But if you then go on and tell him that all these things are part and parcel of the Monroe Doctrine, that they flow out of it, he will at once become grave and reverential, and say: "Ah, that is a different matter. If it is all in the Monroe Doctrine, I have nothing to say. I am for the Monroe Doctrine every time." And he will support the Monroe Doctrine, and "stand behind" any one who recommends its application, without discussion or examination, just as a Mussulman rallies to the sacred standard in a holy war. The Monroe Doctrine, like all doctrines firmly held, is fundamental, above criticism, something to fight for and die for, like all articles of religious faith.

The inconvenience, for a great commercial state, of having a doctrine of this sort, which intimately concerns not our eternal but our temporal welfare, is not discussable, and has to be enforced without regard to consequences, has been made very plain during the past few weeks. If Monroe's opinion were called, not a doctrine but a policy, we think there is hardly a doubt that the appointment of a commission like that now serving to report on the boundary between Great Britain and Venezuela would have taken place in a quiet and gentlemanly way, as the result of friendly communication with Great Britain. Policy is something intended for human happiness, and to be considered with reference to human comfort and convenience, while doctrine concerns the things of the spirit, the unknown or unknowable concerns of the individual soul. A nation which lives by doctrine is necessarily, like Turkey, somewhat, at least, of a theocracy. It has often to pursue courses in obedience to the doctrine which. are full of misery for man as a member of human society. A nation which lives by policy or expediency, on the other hand, asks itself at every step, "Does this make for justice, for peace, for law? Is it reasonable? Will it increase the burdens or promote the comfort of the poor? Will it cherish the great interests of civilization, the spread of knowledge, the rule of science, the feeling of brotherhood among the sorely tried and much puzzled nations of the earth?" Of all the misfortunes which can overtake a society, the greatest is having to live under a dominion which cannot be discussed, and which cannot be judged by its probable results.

For these reasons, and many others for which we have no space here, we think the chances of future peace and order on this continent would be much improved if we got into the way of talking of the Monroe Doctrine as the Monroe Policy, and taught the coming generation that,

made much excitement, because its action would have been set down to "politics," and Mr. Cleveland would have been relied on to prevent any mischievous result. It was Mr. Cleveland, therefore, and Mr. Cleveland alone, who made the panic, and he virtually confessed in his second, hysterical message, that he had not duly con

HOMEOPATHY IN GOVERNMENT.

WHEN the Jingo craze was at its height, the story reached us, through an excellent channel, that the excuse for Mr. Cleveland's message was that he had learned that the Republicans in Congress were preparing, and would surely pass, a warlike resolution directed against England, and that he felt compelled, as a politician, to forestall them, in his own interest and that of his party. On Thursday the Evening Post printed a despatch from its Washington correspondent, containing another version of the same story, on still better authority. This ran as follows:

"We all knew it [the Davis resolution] as long ago as last spring. The scheme was carefully hatched, undoubtedly for political purposes and nothing higher. The President simply headed it off. The public furor which this action of Congress would have brought about has simply been discounted. and, now that the Jingo resolution is before the people, it is found to have spent its force. The people found all they wanted in the President's message, and have no use for the Senate resolution. The Senate has already discovered this. As a re sult the Davis resolution won't pass the Senate. Mark my prophecy. It is losing friends every day... Had Congress, however, acting by itself, passed such a measure as the Davis resolution on the eve of Great Britain's asser. tion of her claim in Venezuela, it would have been equivalent to a declaration of war. I contend, therefore, that the President performed a valuable public service in the interests of peace in forestalling Congress and robbing it

of its hostile ammunition."

Here, as will be seen, the President acts simply in the interest of peace, and not in that of party. He hears that Congress is disposed to declare war, so he determines to declare it in advance of them, in the belief that his war would not be taken so seriously as the congressional war, and would be more readily got rid of.

There are two weaknesses in this story. One is that Congress, far from leaving him to fight the British alone, immediately "stood behind him," and endorsed his war measure without debate-an incident, we think, without parallel in the history of parliamentary government. The craziest war venture of any modern nation was that of France in 1870, but that project was before the Chambers and under discussion for nearly two weeks-that is, from July 6 to July 19. What frightened the country and the world in December was not what Congress said or did, but what the President said and did, for he held the confidence of the country for steadiness and self-control and courage and rationality, in a remarkable degree. Congress, speaking alone, would not have

step he was taking.

The second weakness of the story is more serious. It is a confession that our sanest statesman was ready on a pinch to administer the Government on homoopathic principles; that is, when he heard that a coördinate branch was going to engage in an enterprise injurious in the highest degree to the national interests, he was prepared to anticipate it by administering to the unfortunate people a smaller dose of the same stuff. Foreseeing that Congress would shortly get drunk, he determined, by way of cure, to anticipate their bout by one of his own, feeling that his own recovery would be speedier than theirs and less costly. But the result was that they joined him in his carouse, and they both went to work to smash the national furniture and crockery. We have not a word to say against the homoeopathic system as a therapeutic agency for the human body, but in daily life no one calls in a homoeopathic doctor without knowing what he is about, and the nature of the remedies to be prescribed to him. The President of the United States has no license to practise it on the people of the United States. It would be impossible to find in any debate or discussion of the Constitution the smallest authority for the doctrine that the President may head off anticipated folly on the part of Congress by minor folly of his own.

The framers of the Constitution had evidently never dreamed that any such theory of the President's powers or duties would ever see the light, much less be ac cepted. Hamilton says in the Federalist:

"The republican principle demands that the deliberate sense of the community should gov ern the conduct of those to whom they intrust the management of their affairs; but it does not require an unqualified complaisance to every sudden breeze of passion, or to every transient impulse which the people may receive from the arts of men who flatter their prejudices to betray their interests. It is a just observation that the people commonly intend the public good. This often applies to their very errors. But their good sense would despise the adulator who should pretend that they always reason right about the means of promoting it. They know from experience that they sometimes err; and the wonder is that they so seldom err as they do, beset, as they continually are, by the wiles of parasites and sycophants, by the snares of the ambitious, the avaricious, the desperate, by the artifices of men who possess their confidence more than they deserve it, and of those who seek to possions present themselves in which the interests sess rather than to deserve it. When occaof the people are at variance with their incli nations, it is the duty of the persons whom they have appointed to be the guardians of those interests, to withstand the temporary delusion in order to give them time and opportunity for more cool and sedate reflection. Instances might be cited in which a conduct of this kind has saved the people from very fatal consequences of their own mistakes, and has procured lasting monuments of their grati tude to men who had courage and magnani."

mity enough to serve them at the peril of their displeasure."

With the position which Mr. Cleveland had before the country in November last he could well have waited calmly for any act of folly the majority in Congress could commit. He was waiting in that attitude for their financial or fiscal follies. He expected, and the public expected him, to meet them with a veto. Nay, his enemies in Congress used the certainty of a veto as a reason for not being so foolish as they would have liked. He was put in the Presidency to stand guard against such things as the Davis resolution, as much as against a free-silver bill or a McKinley tariff. There was no likelihood that Congress would exercise the war-declaring power. What was to be anticipated was a blatherskite concurrent resolution, like the one now before the Senate, and that he could have met with a veto which would have given him the opportunity of his life, and sent him out of office with a reputation following close on that of Washington and Lincoln. He might in such a veto have explained the exact condition of the Venezuelan negotiations, and have revealed our own ignorance of the merits of the controversy, have announced his plan for seeking light on the subject, have defined the nature and scope of the "Monroe Doctrine," the rights it proclaims and the duties it imposes, and have, at the same time, formulated the American view of war as a means of settling controversies among nations, in a way that would have made one of the great state papers of American history, and have substituted the Cleveland Doctrine for the Monroe Doctrine in the popular mind and memory. This is what those who most admired him and have longest supported him, expected of him.

Their bitter disappointment is due to that most pernicious legacy of the Middle Ages, that fatal "relic of barbarism," the idea that even for us-"foremost in the files of time" as we consider ourselveswar is a thing not to be pondered or discussed; that when contemplating the most awful action that man can take against the peace and dignity of his fellow-man, it is base to reflect, to reason, to take counsel, to seek the better way; that in such crises the nearer we get to the enraged tiger or bulldog, the more reason we have to be proud of ourselves. If there was one man in the country whom last November we considered superior to this sad delusion, we should have said it was Mr. Cleveland. We consider his subserviency to it, next to the wild "standing behind" him when he issued his challenge, the saddest sight this century has witnessed.

TARIFF LEGISLATION.

COLORADO held the attention of the country on Wednesday of last week in rather an impressive way. In addition to Senator Wolcott's brilliant speech on the Da

vis resolution, Senator Teller delivered one on the tariff bill and the financial situation generally, which made a decided stir and is likely to have important consequences. Mr. Teller's speech, like that of his colleague, was effective in telling the truth at a critical moment, and knocking over a lot of humbugs that had been leaning against each other ever since the session began, maintaining an uncertain equilibrium, and sure to fall if anybody should give them a front blow.

The centre of Mr. Teller's attack was the House tariff bill which is still in the Senate committee on finance. The history of this bill is pretty well known. It was concocted by the Ohio wool-growing triumvirate the same who laid the foundation for the McKinley tariff in 1889-'90. This interesting clique came to Washington before the present session began, and took steps to commit the Republican party to the enactment of a tariff on wool, not now, but a year or two hence, provided the party should be successful in the coming Presidential election. It was a game that these people were very familiar with. They had played it often. Revenue for the Government had nothing to do with it; but the Republican leaders, when the measure was forced upon them, put the revenue pretence forward as a stalkinghorse. They passed the bill through the House as one of the happy financial conceits of the hour, along with the Venezuela Commission bill and the bond bill. It reached the Senate simultaneously with the bond bill, and both were referred to the finance committee, which is a freesilver committee presided over by the most pronounced gold-bug in the Senate.

This committee promptly substituted a free-coinage bill for the bond bill, and then sat upon the tariff bill, waiting to see what would be the effect on the temper of the House. The effect being nil, mutterings began to be heard in the free-silver camp to the effect that the tariff bill was a measure for the protection of wool-growers, that it was for revenue not to the Government but to private individuals, and that silver-miners were just as much entitled to a tax for their benefit as wool-growers or anybody else. Yet the McKinley organs were hopeful that, as Senator Jones, who held the balance of power in the committee, had been a good Republican before he went over to the Populists, he would allow free play to his natural instincts and let this little bill pase without a free-silver amendment. Such an amendment, if securely fastened to the wool bill, would kill the whole measure in the House. Hence the importance of getting it past the danger point of the finance committee.

It has not yet passed that point when Mr. Teller pounces upon it and shakes it as a terrier would shake a rat. His opinion of it was expressed in the following vigorous terms:

"I know very well that the free silver bill will not become a law. But I am tired of be

ing lectured by Senators who know equally well that the revenue bill will not become a law. There has never been the slightest expectation of its becoming a law. Even if it should be brought before the Senate and finally passed by the aid of two or three Populist votes, it would be sure to meet with an executive veto. Had you the slightest expectation of its ever becoming a law it would have been framed on very different lines. It was just put in to Congress as a political move, and for no other purpose. As this is to be a political play, we will play politics on our side.'

This is something more than a hint that the Republican silver Senators are not to be coaxed or coerced into passing the tariff bill merely to give the wool-growers a good position at some future time. What the latter want is the chance to say, whenever the Republican party comes into full power: "You passed our bill when you could not get the approval of the executive; you committed yourselves to us then, and you cannot go back now; therefore please to pass it again." The free-silver Republicans have no particular objection to the wool bill per se. They simply want to force their own measure along with it. This they cannot do, and they know that they cannot, but neither will they allow any other measure for the private interest of a class to go through while theirs is kept behind, especially when its object is not of a practical nature at present, but is merely to commit the party to pass some similar bill at some future time.

It is in the interest of good government that Mr. Teller and those who stand with him should stand firm. The wool bill, besides being a bad measure, is a game of false pretences. The leading Republicans, in fact, do not want it to pass. The woollen industry of the country has scarcely yet adjusted itself to free wool, and now it is asked to turn a second summersault and adjust itself to a high tariff on its raw material. Of course this will not be the last of it. A new tax on wool will lead to renewed efforts to throw it off, and these efforts will be successful eventually. Meanwhile the business will be "all torn up." There can be no settled trade, no steady employment. It is bad enough to have all our industries based on the rolling stone of an uncertain standard of value. The woollen industries, if we set out on a new tariff adventure, will have to bear the silver trouble, which is common to all, and another one special to them selves. It will be something of a paradox if they find relief from the latter at the hands of those who are producing the former.

THE SILVER PARTY'S PLATFORM. THE silverites, in their preliminary convention at Washington on Thursday, adopted a preliminary platform with several preambles, one of which recites that the demonetization of silver in 1873 caused a fall in the prices of all kinds of property "except in peculiarly favored localities." It proceeds to say that "such fall of prices

has destroyed the profits of legitimate industry, injuring the producer for the benefit of the non-producer, increasing the burden of the debtor, and swelling the gains of the creditor, paralyzing the productive energies of the American people, relegating to idleness vast numbers of willing workers, sending the shadows of despair into the home of the honest toiler, filling the land with tramps and paupers, and building up colossal fortunes at the money centres." In connection with this misstatement of the causes of the present stringency we call attention also to another, which Senator Sherman had the hardihood to make in his debate with Senator Teller on Wednesday. The subject under debate was the pending sale of bonds, and Mr. Teller remarked, with perfect simplicity and perfect truth: "You are not selling bonds to meet deficiencies [of revenue]. You are selling bonds to accumulate gold." To which Mr. Sherman replied:

"If there was no deficiency, there would be no demand for gold. For fourteen years that $100,000,000 of gold stood there in the Treasury, a standard of credit, and no one approached it or diminished it. But the moment the deficiencies occur, then they say they sell the bonds to keep the gold reserve good; but it is to meet the deficiencies, because to meet the deficiencies they take the gold."

It is very convenient for Mr. Sherman to overlook the operation of the act of July 14, 1890, otherwise called the Sherman act, which added nearly $200,000,000 to the fiat money of the country, and alarmed the public on both sides of the water to such an extent that they began to withdraw capital from this country, and continued to do so until the panic of 1893 occurred and it became necessary to repeal that fatal measure. The operation of the Sherman act was coincident with a deficiency of revenue, but it was itself a cause contributing to the deficiency, because it required the purchase of 4,500,000 ounces of silver bullion each month, or more than twice as much as had been

required before. The purchases were made in a deceitful, or at all events misleading, way. The Government paid for the silver with Treasury notes; but as the notes were redeemable on demand in gold, it might as well have paid gold directly for the silver bullion so bought. As a matter of fact, the exports of gold from the country during the time the Sherman act was in operation were just about equal to the emission of Treasury notes. The author of the act in question has reasons enough for ignoring that feature of the panic of 1893 and the subsequent misery; but the business men who were ruined by it, and the multitudes who were thrown out of employment in consequence of it, have too many reasons to remember it.