AMERICAN FINANCE 397 



introduced. If not one was passed, every project sought to 

 unsettle in some way existing conditions. This threat of 

 instability is one of the penalties of the great blessing of 

 free speech and unstinted right of petition. The day must 

 have its shadows a well as its sunshine. The confession that 

 weak links can be found in our financial chain shall not drive 

 us into pessimism. We know the growth and the reserve of 

 strength. Under the act of March 14, 1900, every dollar is 

 equal to every other dollar, and all are interchangeable. Be- 

 cause they are most in use among all the people everywhere, 

 the small notes are in greatest demand. If conditions point 

 at all to a premium, the ones, twos and fives will command it 

 first. But the level is well maintained. Whatever winds 

 blow or storms beat, our currency has a surface as clear and 

 even as a mirror. That surface is not of mercury, shifting 

 and undulating; it is formed of the minted gold. 



The stronghold of our financial system is its actual gold, 

 as well as our statutes. The world has about $5,500,000,000 

 of this metal, of which the United States has in its stock 

 $1,342,422,740. In the last reported year, the world pro- 

 duced less than $300,000,000, of which our mines gave $80,- 

 000,000. Our treasury holds $700,000,000 in gross, and our 

 banks, national and other, have $300,000,000, approximately. 

 So over one fifth of all the world's gold is in the United States, 

 and the bulk of it is in the banks and the treasury. The in- 

 crease in gold in both forms in our currency in five years has 

 been just less than $300,000,000 ($299,853,457), and in the 

 past year from August 1st to August 1st, $137,727,920. The 

 charge is put forth often in spirit, and sometimes in words, 

 that we are extravagant and wasteful in the possession of so 

 much of the precious metal. Are we? A leading financial 

 journal of New York quotes the president of one of the largest 

 banks in San Francisco as alleging that it costs $20 to get a 

 dollar of gold out of the ground. Was the metal all that the 

 picks of the miners and their self sacrifice took out of the 

 earth? Did not the argonauts of 1849 and their successors 

 create the California of to-day? The ranches, the orchards, 

 the wheat and the fruit, the factories and shipyards, the 

 cities, the churches, the universities, the civilization of that 



