State Convention—Dollars and Sense. 261 
When I was a lad, which seems but yesterday, a man that could 
afford wheaten bread for his family was considered “ well off. 11 It 
was onty the johnny-cake, hand-to-mouth men that were considered 
u poor cusses. 11 A man worth SI,000 in cash was esteemed wealthy 
in the rural districts, while the resident of the city or large town 
that was the possessor of $10,000 was looked upon as a nabob, 
while 'such a thing as a millionaire was classed among the fables. 
But, since then we have, as Senator Buckingham said, gone 
through many struggles to maintain specie payments, which have 
resulted in every instance in the loss of millions to productive in¬ 
dustry, (we must remember it is labor that creates all wealth and 
makes good all losses,) while the losses invariably enrich the pocket 
of the non-producer, and now, to be considered rich, one must possess 
his hundreds of thousands, and to be a nabob, his gains must be 
counted by the millions. Verily have we not been going at railroad 
and telegraph speed? 
How often are we pointed to our European loans as evidence of 
our increase of capital. O, says the bullionist, don’t 3 T ou see the 
stream of capital flowing in from Europe, as the product of our 
bonds? No, I do not see it, nor do I believe any one else sees it, 
for the simple reason that we don’t get any capital from Europe, 
but on the contrary, we send capital there. Even if we violate the 
nomenclature of political economy, and call money capital, we get 
nothing of the kind from Europe, but at five per cent, interest, 
we send back every twenty years all we borrow, and just as much 
more for its use . Thus, every twenty years we send to Europe 
- more than two dollars for every one we nominally receive, which 
makes us poorer and Europe richer to that extent. 
But, says the bullionist, we get gold for our bonds, and that is a 
vast immediate relief. Now, in the first place, we don’t, nor have 
we received a dollar from Europe in coin for our bonds. Then, 
what do we receive? Why, we either swap our bonds for other 
United States bonds on the market, or we take a store-pay.” I 
mean by this, in plain English, just what I say. We sell our bonds 
to Europe and trade them out —not a dollar in coin passing the 
ocean—nothing but bills of exchange between English and French 
jobbers and American importers, interspersed with a little dicker, 
by courtesy called diplomacy, between the two governments. Let 
me introduce some testimony on this point. The celebrated pro- 
