m I recently talked. "If wages be
up, how come 'em up? We all's gittin' but half what we useter git for our
cotton, and how kin five cents a pound pay me like ten cents a pound, and
me a pickin' out no mo' cotton?" His philosophy applies to 60 per cent. of
all the working people in the United States, for that proportion do not
work for money wages. They produce, and what they sell the product for is
their wages. Viewed in this, the only true light, the wages of 60 per
cent. of our laborers have declined nearly one half, making the average
decline for all laborers nearly a third. How, indeed, could it be
otherwise? Will any sensible man believe that a farmer could pay men as
much to produce wheat at $.50 as at $1.50? Or take the case of the cotton
grower. It takes a talented negro to make and save 3,000 pounds of lint
cotton; when he sold it at $.10 he got $300, and when he sells it at $.05
he gets $150, and all the tricks of all the goldbugs in the world cannot
make it otherwise. To tell such men that their wages have increased, in
the face of what they know to be the facts, is arrogant and insulting
nonsense.

=This nation should have the best money in the world.=

Very true. And the question of what is the best can only be determined by
science and experience. It is certain that gold standing alone is not; for
its fluctuations in purchasing power have been so tremendous as again and
again to throw the commercial world into jimjams. History shows that it
has varied 100 per cent. in a century, and we have seen in this country
that its value declined about 25 per cent. from 1848 to 1857, and that it
has increased something like 60 per cent. since 1873. Without desiring to
be ill-natured, I must say it seems to me that a man has a queerly
constituted mind who insists that that is the only "honest money."

=But we don't want 50-cent dollars.=

And you can't have 'em, my dear sir. A dollar consists of 100 cents. The
phrase "50-cent dollar" and that other phrase "honest money" remind me of
what I used to hear in my boyhood when the slavery question was debated
with such heat: "What! Would you want your sister to marry a nigger?
Whoosh!" It was assumed, if a man denounced slavery, that he wanted the
colored man for a brother-in-law. Men who employ such phrases show a
secret consciousness of having a weak cause. And while I am about it I may
as well add that I do not admire the way some of our fellows have of
denouncing