342 Edward Livingston Youmans. 



NEW YORK, January <?, 1878. 



MY DEAR SPENCER: Times are still tight. The promise 

 of revived business which was made in autumn has not 

 been kept. To me things now look worse than ever. The 

 collapse that you feared would come crashing after the 

 war was escaped, but I fear the essential difficulty was only 

 postponed. The people have now leisure to contemplate 

 the stupendous rottenness of the whole greenback war 

 policy, by which they were sold to the speculators of the 

 world and buried under an avalanche of indebtedness. 



The spirit of repudiation is rife among the people, and 

 in some places rampant and unchecked. How much sound- 

 ness remains in American financial feeling will be tested 

 by the result of the present tremendous effort to pay off 

 the national bonds in depreciated silver. Hence the con- 

 tinued depression and prostration of business and the har- 

 vest of bankruptcies and defalcations, in which the element 

 of fraud is so frequent and prominent as to cause wide- 

 spread alarm. There is continued inquiry about your 

 books, and I yesterday sent a letter to the West replying 

 to questions about new editions. People are very ignorant, 

 and there is no end to the work of explanation. 



March 8, 1878. 



Our country has entered upon the course of deliberate 

 repudiation. This is what I could not have believed pos- 

 sible, for I have always believed that, whatever else were 

 let go, the Americans would have maintained their trading 

 integrity on the simple ground of self-interest. You will 

 have in the Pall Mall Gazette of to-day the intelligence of 

 the passage of the Silver bill over the President's veto.* 

 When the veto message was read there was not a solitary 

 man in the House or in the Senate to say a good word for 



* The reference is to the infamous Bland bill. 



