appropriation there exists a plenty, even
a plethora, of gold. And let me say this: there is a deal of claptrap
talked and written and printed and practiced concerning this business of
a currency, a subject which when given a right survey presents no
difficulty. Mankind has been taught that in the essence of things fiscal
your question of currency is as intricate and involved as was the
labyrinth of Minos. And then, to add ill-doing to ill-teaching, our own
crazy-patch system of finance has been in every one of its patches cut
and basted and stitched with an interest of politics or of private gain
to guide the shears and needle of what money-tailor was at work. A
country, if it would, could have a circulating medium, and all coined
yellow gold, of two hundred dollars, or five hundred dollars, or one
thousand dollars per capita for population, and, beyond the expense of
the mint, without costing that country a shilling. One, being business
manager of the nation, as fast as the mints would work could pour forth
an unbroken stream of gold money, half-eagles, eagles, and double
eagles, to what breadth and depth for a whole circulation one would, and
never spend a shilling beyond the working of the mints.

"Observe, now; as a nation we have a business manager. He holds in his
fingers five twenty-dollar gold pieces. He buys one hundred dollars'
worth of gold bullion with them. The public, if it would, might buy gold
as freely as does any private individual. Our business manager gets the
bullion, while the other, a gold miner perhaps, takes the gold coin.
Then our business manager stamps the bullion he has bought--one hundred
dollars' worth--into five new twenty-dollar gold pieces.

"With these in his palm he is ready for another bargain with the gold
miner. Again the miner gets the gold pieces, and again our business
manager gets one hundred dollars' worth of yellow bullion. This he
coins; and being thereby re-equipped with five more new twenty-dollar
pieces he returns to the experiment.

"This barter and this coinage might go on while a grain of the world's
gold remained uncoined. At the finish, our business manager would have
only one hundred yellow dollars in his fist; but there would be billions
coined and stamped and in circulation. And the country would be neither
in nor out a dollar. I am talking of coinage, not taxation, remember.

"Once in circulation the law would protect the money from being clipped
or mutilated