We have never really had one. We have only pretended to have one. One dollar in gold to five or seven in paper is no real gold basis. We have pretended it was, and as a consequence it has happened inevitably that the moment confidence ceased the banks have always suspended specie payments. Just at the moment we needed specie we could not get it of the banks. It is of no use trying to keep up this sham any longer.

English economists may well clamor for gold and silver as the sole basis for banking. With them two-thirds of their national wealth is floating-only one-third fixed. They can afford to deal, in arranging currency, with only floating wealth. They have more than enough of it. Here two-thirds of our national wealth is fixed, and only one-third floating. That England was not undone by the Suez canal, she owes to the amount of her floating capital and her prompt way of using it. This is an important distinction in settling the financial policy of a nation. Evidently if we would avail ourselves to the full of all our strength we must use fixed property -land, &c.-to aid our currency and banking methods. Otherwise we enter the field of competition with our right hands chained. Even Bullionist Bowen allows that without irredeemable papermoney, England could not have conquered Napoleon; that papernotes fought the battle of Waterloo, kept her working-men employed, gave them ease under almost incredible taxes, and secured to trade unexampled prosperity. Our late war tells the same story. Yet there are those who seem never able to learn the lesson.

As for our international currency we must remember that a debtor nation is always the slave of his creditor. Our slavery to England is seen in the fear that the Bank of England would swamp Mr. Boutwell's syndicate if he did not conform to the wishes of the bank. In consequence of this dependence a debtor nation should separate entirely its national currency from its international currency, in order to save its home-system from foreign interference. I propose, therefore, one system of currency for home use, and another, entirely distinct, for use between ourselves and foreign nations.

We must remember that our coin is worth nothing abroad as coin. "Bullion is the 'cash' of international trade; paper currencies are of no use there, and coins pass only as they contain more or less bullion." Bagehot, p. 44. Our coin is received abroad only

as so much merchandise, according to its purity and price in the market, like wheat. Still, as gold is a convenient medium of exchange on many accounts, and at present is so received by the world, our government will help merchants to use it. In order to do this the government will certify by its stamp the weight and purity of gold bars sent to its mints, and government will keep gold deposited with it by merchants, and give certificates for its amount and value. Such certificates may be used here and abroad, thus enabling the merchants to save the cost and risk of carrying gold to and fro, and the expense of insurance. In this way we furnish the merchants with certificates which will soon be of the same use and value as gold itself, whether in the form of bars or coin. If any one doubts whether the government is honest enough to be trusted with such power, I answer it is as honest as the national banks who now wield these powers. We must trust such power somewhere. We can detect and punish and prevent misdoing more quickly in the government than we can in money corporations shielded by privacy.

There are doubtless some special kinds of business so profitable that men engaged in them can afford to pay 10 and 12 per cent. But I am sure that business men will support me in saying that business in general-the average business of the country-cannot be carried on with profit while money is at 7 per cent. or much above.

You must therefore lessen the rate of interest, either by attracting foreign capital here, or by inventing some new way to make freer use of all we have, of every kind. Only thus can the laboring and trading class prosper. Such reduction of interest would have saved the North from present wholesale bankruptcy; by developing the industry of the South it would have gone far to prevent the political troubles there which loom so darkly over our future.

28 A

DRESS.

BY JOHN BASCOM, LL.D.

President of the University of Wisconsin.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: I naturally feel a certain diffidence, a fear of offence, in scattering criticisms as freely as I must among my audience in speaking on the subject of dress. My apology is, I strike an honest stroke straight before me, and can do no otherwise than mean the person I hit. But I beg leave to remind you that I am but one among a hundred; you can, at any moment, fall back on your reserved right to tear in pieces and spurn what I have written, as something set down either in ignorance or insolence or both. fer no damage between us; but that while, like an angel of strength it may bestow some lusty whacks on all shoulders, it will slowly drive us one and all into obedience; knight us one and all in its order of honor. That which most occupies our thoughts, we sometimes carefully keep back from our lips, suppressing in speech, as unimportant, things which the free and secret forces of the mind have pronounced of greatest moment by dwelling on them with habitual solicitude. The formal declaration is held aloof from the hidden. opinions only that these may be cherished with less contradiction and disturbance, and that we need not blush at feelings which for us have no other wrong than that of publicity. We frequently deal thus with our affections, and hide them out of sight by an assumed indifference most untrue to them. So, also, we reserve from discussion the subject of dress, speaking of it as a trivial theme, scarcely to be inquired into with severity, or pursued with sober purpose; yet belie our neglect by thinking more of it, and doing more in reference to it, than in behalf of any one of all the grave, wise subjects we habitually return to in discussion. We eschew thought on this topic, not because we have practically declared it an unimportant one, but because, having wrapped about it all the petty affections and vanities of the soul, we feel instantly uncom

Let us trust, however, that the truth will suf

fortable and disturbed at any prospective denunciation or modification of our opinion. The plea of neglect involved in the triviality of the subject, is one of the soul's deceits, by which it reserves to itself without intrusion, this stalking-ground of its minor amours and passions.

Few themes are more important than this of dress, if we are to measure importance either by the labor involved, the time occupied, the thought occasioned, or the direct or indirect effects on character. In all these particulars, dress, among the concomitants of life, is chief; is the least simple and the most vexatious want. Food, shelter and dress are the primitive necessities, and though dress comes latest as least urgent, it soon, in civilized communities, presents a variety, importunity and constancy of claims which, all the elements of influence considered, make it the most productive of the three in personal characteristics and social effects.

The invention of christian communities-and christian communities as opposed to barbarous and semi-civilized ones, have no more obvious, ostensible mark than the multiplicity, variety and odd distortion of their garments-is kept at constant tension to devise fresh fabrics, modify patterns, and work changing novelties into the web, or coloring, or form of their dress. A slight success is an income; a notable success, a fortune. The terms by which these products of our ingenious, untiring and ever-changing art are designated, constitute a dialect by themselves, and a fashionable periodical, treating of materials and styles, is untelligible to the merely English scholar. Nor does the knowledge of one season answer for the next. Each year takes up the problem of growing complexity as much as possible in an independent way; and feels the fashion nearest to it only as the latest and strongest repulsion.

A wardrobe fairly representing the fashions of our times would be found to touch or gather in a vast variety of industries; to have drawn from all nationalities, and every grade of civilization, and hold in leash every form of extreme service; hunters in northern forests and in tropical deserts, divers in the sea, Brazilian slaves, and needle-women, in whom highest luxury and deepest poverty touch each other with constant out-cry on our civilization.

It is a common plea in behalf of luxuries that they give employment to the poor and so aid them. It seems strange that as a rule the most costly articles make the stingiest returns to labor. Wit

ness corals, diamonds, cashmere shawls, India shawls, tapestry needle-work, lace; hold these last fabrics to the light and the skeleton hand of death will be seen to have wrought in them, tracing in their web and woof as a water-mark the curses of outraged humanity. A ship of war, a great merchant-man making ready for a cruise around the globe, would hardly in their outfit make such claims on the market, worry so many importers, perplex so many clerks, get together such diverse, far-fetched and wonderful things as one little argosy of fashion, destined to a watering-place on a pleasure trip of a dozen days. The mammoth trunks of our stations fairly indicate what the industrial world is at, to what burdens the shoulders of porters are bending in the march of life, whose impedimenta they are that fill the baggage-wagons of the race, cutting it off from a quick, effective, victorious march in social and industrial progress. Any margin of time and labor that the world gets to itself in industry is devoted to this endless and hopeless consumption involved in the merest accidents of living, in clothing one's self, so that he can walk among his fellows and begin to look out on the world before and above him.

But the effect of dress on character is more even than that indicated by this demand on time and labor in its preparation. Some tasks, as those of the mechanic's, come as the regular allotments of the day, and have but a slight hold on the thoughts, save in their actual performunce. But the labor involved in dress, on the part of those most given to it, is not so much a stated duty, as a perpetual, personal, and teasing anxiety; something crowding into all leisure hours, pre-occupying the mind, and perpetually tasking the powers for critical observation, ingenious device, and patient execution. Hence, the plans, vexations, and victories of dress are taken into the inmost meditative life, and are liable, at any moment, and in any place, to crowd in a hope or a fear; to flush the face with a sense of success or of failure, to give rise to a new undertaking, and to call in the thoughts afresh for the petty achievements of mantua-making. Moreover, dress is the visible, habitual language of the foolish vanities, the trivial emulations and secondary distinctions of society. It must be studied by each one who enters polite circles, a competitor for position and power, as a series of signals, showing where the dangers lie, how they are to be met, and on what hinges the hopes of success are turning. Dress is a species of