PRACTICAL PAPERS. 
THE CURRENCY. 
VIEWS OF HON. WENDELL PHILLIPS. 
| A paper read before the Financial Department of the Social Science Association, 
at Boston, March 3,1875.] 
I was surprised, gentlemen, when it was proposed that I should 
make any suggestion of plans and methods on this subject. You 
are most of you experts—have passed your lives in business and 
have studied these questions for many years. Of course, your opin¬ 
ions are entitled to great weight. I offer my suggestions with 
sincere deference to your more mature judgment. Nevertheless, 
you must allow me to say that political economy is a science—if, in¬ 
deed, it yet deserves that name—whose doctors so uniformly disagree 
that no one sage’s opinion is entitled to any very great weight. In 
these matters, the world is, to a great extent, still afloat on the sea 
of experiment. Our late war-experience scattered half the cob-web 
theories that political economists had been spinning for a hundred 
years. 
Further, many men of practical business experience agree in the 
views I offer you. Were it not so, I should hesitate to submit them. 
These are men who have made fortunes in regular business, and 
what is far rarer and more difficult in this country, have known 
how to keep what they have made. 
I have talked often on these matters with John Nesmith, lieuten¬ 
ant-governor under Andrew; a man who made a million in manu¬ 
factures, and kept it. He printed some portions of his conclusions 
on these topics,—a valuable contribution to the literature of the 
subject. He substantially agreed with me. Governor Bucking¬ 
ham, of Connecticut, a republican, a successful business man, advo¬ 
cated almost exactly what I mean to offer you, in an able speech in 
the United States Senate. I have in my mind a business man who 
