d weighed. In Eastern Asia,
which we have invaded, and a part of which we have appropriated for
a time, the people use silver for the measure of value, and in the
islands that interest us, as they do not deal in the mysteries of
rupees, but in dollars, the facts in the case are plainly within the
common understanding. In Manila the Mexican dollar goes in ordinary
small exchanges, payment of wages and settlement of bills, for fifty
cents; but the banks sell the Mexicans twenty-one of them for ten gold
dollars--an American eagle! So far as the native people go, labor and
produce are counted in silver, and the purchaser, or employer gets
as much for a silver dollar as for a gold dollar. The native will
take ten dollars in gold for ten dollars only in all settlements
of accounts, and would just as willingly--even more so, accept ten
Mexican dollars as ten American dollars in gold coin. Salaries are
paid and goods delivered according to the silver standard. Of course,
in due time this state of things will pass away, if we hold to the
gold standard, but as the case stands the soldiers and sailors of
our army and fleet, paid under the home standard, receive double pay,
and get double value received for clothing, tobacco and whatever they
find they want--indeed, for the necessaries and luxuries of life. The
double standard in this shape is not distasteful to the boys.

We have both theories and conditions confronting us in these aspects
of the silver and labor questions. The Oriental people are obdurate
in their partiality for silver. It is the cheaper labor that adheres
to the silver standard, partially, it is held, because silver is the
more convenient money for the payment of small sums. But labor cannot
be expected, at its own expense, to sustain silver for the profit of
capital, or rather of the middle man between labor and capital. Labor,
so far as it is in politics in this country, should not, without
most careful study and deliberation, conclude that its force in
public affairs would be abated, and its policy of advancing wages
antagonized by the absorption of the Philippines in our country. On
the contrary, the statesmanship that is representative of labor may
discover that it is a great fact, one of the greatest of facts,
that the various countries and continents of the globe are being
from year to year more and more closely associated, and that to
those intelligently interested, without regard to the application
of