ignorance and poverty,
finally turned with pathetic fury to the cure-all of a political leader
in the West. This latter prophet, seeing gold becoming scarcer and
scarcer and the cash and credits of the land falling into the hands of
a few who were manipulating them for their own benefit, had decided
that what was needed was a greater volume of currency, so that credits
would be easier and money cheaper to come by in the matter of interest.
Silver, of which there was a superabundance in the mines, was to be
coined at the ratio of sixteen dollars of silver for every one of gold
in circulation, and the parity of the two metals maintained by fiat of
government. Never again should the few be able to make a weapon of the
people's medium of exchange in order to bring about their undoing.
There was to be ample money, far beyond the control of central banks
and the men in power over them. It was a splendid dream worthy of a
charitable heart, but because of it a disturbing war for political
control of the government was shortly threatened and soon began. The
money element, sensing the danger of change involved in the theories of
the new political leader, began to fight him and the element in the
Democratic party which he represented. The rank and file of both
parties--the more or less hungry and thirsty who lie ever at the bottom
on both sides--hailed him as a heaven-sent deliverer, a new Moses come
to lead them out of the wilderness of poverty and distress. Woe to the
political leader who preaches a new doctrine of deliverance, and who,
out of tenderness of heart, offers a panacea for human ills. His truly
shall be a crown of thorns.

Cowperwood, no less than other men of wealth, was opposed to what he
deemed a crack-brained idea--that of maintaining a parity between gold
and silver by law. Confiscation was his word for it--the confiscation
of the wealth of the few for the benefit of the many. Most of all was
he opposed to it because he feared that this unrest, which was
obviously growing, foreshadowed a class war in which investors would
run to cover and money be locked in strong-boxes. At once he began to
shorten sail, to invest only in the soundest securities, and to convert
all his weaker ones into cash.

To meet current emergencies, however, he was compelled to borrow
heavily here and there, and in doing so he was quick to note that those
banks representing his enemies in Chicago and elsewhere were willing to
acc