business which underlies all
others,--national finance,--and that the advantages resulting therefrom
are: It dispenses with the necessity of an international agreement with
its attendant uncertainties, perils, and delays, and at the same time
points out the way to a sound and permanent home policy upon which all
our factions could unite. It practically restores to silver its
unlimited coinage at its just market rate, injects a healthy stimulus
into the languishing silver industry, preserves our admirable system of
subsidiary coinage, and utilizes both metals as companion pillars of our
national credit. It coaxes gold to the mint, keeps it there, and does
away permanently with bond issues. It provides for the retirement of the
greenbacks, supplies their place with currency equally sound but less
hazardous, and insures the absolute parity of every dollar in
circulation with every other, and with gold. In fine, as every true
principle must, and as only a true principle can, it answers every
condition of the problem to which it applies, and commends itself as the
best, if not the only, way out of our financial embarrassments.

II. BIMETALLISM EXTINGUISHED.

BY JOHN CLARK RIDPATH.

The article on "Bimetallism Simplified" by Mr. George H. Lepper is open
to one serious criticism: the title should be changed to "Bimetallism
_Extinguished_;" for, when the argument is translated out of its
sophistical form, that is its precise meaning. We are obliged, in such a
matter as this--even at the expense of courtesy--to break through the
thin film of plausibility, and at one stroke to lay bare what is in the
bottom.

It is a marvellous thing that they who engage in excogitating this kind
of double-meaning literature about bimetallism, should suppose that the
people can any longer be deluded with it. The agents of the money-power
and the fuglemen of the dominant political party seem to think that a
certain species of casuistry and complicated makeshift of argument can
still be forced into currency, as it has been in the past, and that the
great American democracy can be persuaded thereby to accept fallacy for
truth and thus to perpetuate the reigning Dynasty of Robbers. Messieurs,
you can perform this feat no longer.

Mr. Lepper admits in the outset that the McKinley administration is
doomed _unless_ it can provide the country with a sound and popular
system of bimetallism. As a matter of fact, a sound system of
bimetallism is si