260 
Wisconsin State Agricultural Society. 
of francs to Germany, and at the same moment that country 
has encountered a most formidable crisis! Monev has never been 
*s 
more scarce, or dear, and never has there been witnessed so many 
failures in that country,” etc. 
The fact is, that while France has been working and praying, 
Prussia has been receiving and rioting like a spendthrift son on 
the death of a wealthy father. 
The late Senator Buckingham uttered a truism in the Senate of 
the United States, January 7,1873, when he said: 
u The experience of more than three-quarters of a century fur¬ 
nishes evidence that we have often exerted our energies until they 
have been nearly exhausted, in order to maintain a system of specie 
payments, which, as yet, has been only intermittent. * * The 
business of the country does not absolutely require specie resump¬ 
tion. * * The business of the country is never stationary, but 
is always contracting and expanding. When it contracts, bonds 
will be in demand; when it expands, currency will be in demand,” 
etc. 
Here is an axiom from one of the best political writers of the day, 
that cannot be gainsaid: 
“Any debtor nation that bases its currency, and consequently its 
production and commerce, upon specie, exists, financially, product¬ 
ively, and commercially, on the suffrance of its foreign creditors.” 
I quote the following from Allison’s History of Europe, 1815 to 
1852, chapter 1: 
u But if an increase in the numbers and industry of men co-exist 
with a diminution in the circulating medium by which their trans¬ 
actions are carried on, the most serious evils await society, and the 
whole relation of its different classes to each other will be speedily 
changed, and it is in that state of things that the saying proves 
true that 1 the rich are every day growing richer, and the poor 
poorer. 1 ” 
Mr. Allison could well say this, with the fact staring him in the 
face, that under the specie redemption which began in England, in 
1823, the number of land owners decreased from 165,000, in 1822, 
to 30,766, in 1861. Specie, then, is the rich man’s pavement to more 
wealth, and the poor man’s slough of despond and poverty. There 
is a perfect argument between the history of England, and the 
maxim of the English historian. 
