State Convention—Dollars and Sense. 
256 
individuals could buy all they needed, at rates now prevalent in 
France, and that is next to no premium, unless the rule of cause 
and effect should be reversed. 
While I yet cling to the idea of “hard money,” as a phantom of 
my youth—a sort of day-dream, that would usher delight into the 
soul, to behold as a fixed reality, yet, I must say, a mixed currency 
while we are on the debtor side of the world’s ledger, and while we 
have such a mountain of gold interest-bearing debt, menacing us 
across the Atlantic, would,'it cannot be doubted, breed calamities 
as dreadful and devastating as the locusts of Egypt. To protect 
our coin currency, and keep it on a par with our paper, against the 
depleting attacks of a fluctuating, yet inexorable foreign demand, 
would be as dangerous and futile, as for a lad of six years, with no 
weapon, save a broken-bladed jackknife, attempting to protect a 
sheep-fold against a pack of half-starved wolves. Such a currenc}' 
would always fluctuate like a pendulum between two intermittent 
and discordant forces. This kind of spasmodic struggle to protect 
a portion of our currency, as a “ basis ” for the balance against the 
depletion by foreign “balances,” and the stream of gold going Eu- 
ropeward, to pay interest on a billion of bonds, to say nothing of 
the home demand for the same purposes, must end inevitably in 
specie exhaustion, and be followed by wide-spread financial distress 
and ruin; because our “basis ” would be at the mercy, not only of 
our own gold-room sharks, but its relative value, like the mercury 
in the glass, would rise and fall at every breath from European 
marts, and thus our coin currency would become the shuttle-cock, 
the battle-door, and the foot-ball between our endeavors to protect 
it and European demands to deplete and weaken it. 
But, if we depend not upon a metallic currency, or a base of con- 
vertability in coin, which all correlative history teaches us is a fraud, 
if we forget that a base of redemption, safe and reliable, never has 
been and never will be realized—we shall reap the bitter fruits of 
misplaced confidence. But if we have a currency of our own, secured 
by the integrity of forty-five millions of people, and backed b}^ 
thirty billions of dollars of national wealth, may at our will become 
interest-bearing—a currency that foreign greed does not covet, we 
can, if we are wise, by leaving its production and regulation in the 
hands of the people, who have no motive to contract and expand, 
