e greatest continuous government ever established by man. Mexico
has less than 100 miles of inland navigation, while the United States
has over 35,000 miles. Steam boats can go up the Mississippi, Missouri
and Ohio rivers over 2,500 miles from the Gulf, thus carrying our
seaboard into the very heart of our continent. As to our resources, the
crop of 1879, after feeding our population, furnished for export
283,000,000 bushels of grain. This vast crop was raised on 164,215
square miles, or less than one-twelfth of our arable land. It is
estimated that if all our arable land was under the plow, it would feed
a population of 1,000,000,000 people, and furnish for export
1,000,000,000 bushels of grain food for export. But what can we say of
the people of Mexico and the United States? The difference in our
population is not alone the difference between 10,000,000 in Mexico and
72,000,000 in the United States, but the difference between 10,000,000
Indians and Spaniards and 72,000,000 Anglo-Americans.

Mexicans and Indians are but semi-civilized, and the Spaniards are,
generally speaking, a sluggardly, non-advancing people, while the
Anglo-Americans of the United States are the most highly civilized
people on the earth, wide awake and progressive in science, literature
and mechanical inventions. At a recent exposition in Paris where the
foremost nations of the world were exhibiting for premiums five gold
medals were given for the greatest inventions or discoveries, and how
many came to the United States? Only five; that is all. Now to say that
because Mexico cannot maintain a parity between gold and silver,
America cannot, is just about like saying that a Kentucky race horse
cannot beat an English horse because a Mexican donkey cannot do so. My
friends, our ability to maintain a parity between gold and silver is
our ability to absorb money in our daily and yearly business. Give our
country the increased volume of money that bimetallism will give us
instead of the necessary contracted volume that the gold standard
leaves us, and we will have a genuine lasting wave of prosperity moving
westward from New England, starting the shops at increased wages. That
wave will meet with joy the western prosperity wave that sets in motion
the mining and agricultural interests of a patient and patriotic
people, the eastern and western wave will shake hands with the southern
cotton growers and northern wheat raisers. From the four quarters of
ou