Annual Be poet of the 
try for it; and injurious if possible. I have no fear that we shall 
ever seriously attempt it. Time and circumstances will make 
greenbacks equal to gold—yes, better than gold. But this country 
will never, I think, seriously set about restoring a specie basis as a 
distinct object of effort. Specie basis was a very good method when 
trade was small and interchange of produce was slack. A hundred 
and fifty years ago a relative of mine was able to get from Boston 
to Albany in his own vehicle in three weeks. It would not answer 
at all now to give up the Boston and Albany Railway and confine 
ourselves to such carriages and roads. There is not gold enough 
in the world, or at any rate not enough available for currency, to 
support the business of this generation. You might as well ex¬ 
pect to move the wheat crop of the West in ox-carts. Our fathers 
banked advantageously enough with gold and silver only as a basis. 
The vast needs of to-day require that we should avail ourselves ot 
every other secure and unchanging species of property. 
Evidently, if any nation could hold to a specie basis, England 
could; since she is the treasury where all the world deposits its 
wealth. Yet, after deliberately arranging her whole system only 
thirty years ago (in 1844), she has been obliged to violate her mon¬ 
ey laws three times since,—three times in thirty years,—otherwise, 
as Bagehot allows, the banking (that is, the discount) department 
of the Bank of England “would have failed.” If the latest and 
best writer on Lombard street can be trusted, the Bank of Eng¬ 
land itself could not keep to a specie basis and live, if the commercial 
world did not believe the British government would always save it 
from any and all dangers, at all costs. It is hardly sarcasm to say 
that in this country a merchant could always get specie of the 
banks when he did not want it, and seldom, if ever, when he did. 
This vaunted theory of specie basis may be described as a thing 
which continues to exist, only because men desert it whenever it is 
tried, and go back to it when there is no trouble. I mean no disre¬ 
spect certainly to the worthy gentlemen who advocate this specie 
basis. I will not call it as an able New Jersey man does, “bank¬ 
ruptcy organized,” or as western indignation stamps it, a “fraud.” 
I will not style it as John Earl Williams, one of the ablest of New 
York bank presidents, does, “sewing new cloth into old garments.” 
[ will not say, as he does, that the attempts of banks of issue and 
deposit to keep to specie paying “always have been, and in the na- 
