true light, the wages of 60 per cent. of our laborers have declined nearly one half, making the average decline for all laborers nearly a third.  How, indeed, could it be otherwise?  Will any sensible man believe that a farmer could pay men as much to produce wheat at $.50 as at $1.50?  Or take the case of the cotton grower.  It takes a talented negro to make and save 3,000 pounds of lint cotton; when he sold it at $.10 he got $300, and when he sells it at $.05 he gets $150, and all the tricks of all the goldbugs in the world cannot make it otherwise.  To tell such men that their wages have increased, in the face of what they know to be the facts, is arrogant and insulting nonsense.

=This nation should have the best money in the world.=

Very true.  And the question of what is the best can only be determined by science and experience.  It is certain that gold standing alone is not; for its fluctuations in purchasing power have been so tremendous as again and again to throw the commercial world into jimjams.  History shows that it has varied 100 per cent. in a century, and we have seen in this country that its value declined about 25 per cent. from 1848 to 1857, and that it has increased something like 60 per cent. since 1873.  Without desiring to be ill-natured, I must say it seems to me that a man has a queerly constituted mind who insists that that is the only “honest money.”

=But we don’t want 50-cent dollars.=

And you can’t have ’em, my dear sir.  A dollar consists of 100 cents.  The phrase “50-cent dollar” and that other phrase “honest money” remind me of what I used to hear in my boyhood when the slavery question was debated with such heat:  “What!  Would you want your sister to marry a nigger?  Whoosh!” It was assumed, if a man denounced slavery, that he wanted the colored man for a brother-in-law.  Men who employ such phrases show a secret consciousness of having a weak cause.  And while I am about it I may as well add that I do not admire the way some of our fellows have of denouncing gold as “British money.”  Great fools, indeed, the British would be if they did not fight for a gold basis, for by reason of it they get twice as much of our wheat, meat, and cotton for the $200,000,000 per year we have to pay them in interest.  According to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the world owes England $12,000,000,000, on which she realizes a little over four and a half per cent., or pretty nearly $600,000,000 per year.  Fully that, if we add income from property her citizens own in this and other countries.  On the day we demonetized silver, that $600,000,000 could have been paid in gold in the port of New York with 450,000,000 bushels of wheat; to-day it would take 900,000,000 bushels.  In short, the amount of grain England has made clear because of the rest of the world adopting monometallism would bread all her people, feed all her live stock, and make three gallons of whiskey for every person on the island.  Why shouldn’t they take what the world willingly gives them?  I have my opinion, however, of the common sense of a world which does things that way.