should, from time to time, appoint a committee to meet a committee of working-men. Before such joint committee should be laid open all the details of the business. After mutual consultation such committee should decide the amount of wages to be paid. If they cannot agree, an umpire should be chosen to make the final decision. Such a method has been occasionally resorted to here, and for twenty years in England, with good results. Christianity dictates and sound political economy indorses such a procedure. How broad and sound must be, in years, the education gained by working-men acting on such committees and brought to the close, practical consideration of such large interests; acting, too, under such grave responsibilities! The effect has been very marked in England. Mr. Mundella, member of the House of Commons, assured us he had known instances where the working-men on such committees proposed even a greater reduction of wages than that named by the employers; declaring as the result of their examination that the corporation could not safely pay as large wages as it offered. This shows how acting under grave responsibility educates men, both morally and intellectually.

We have more than enough of the babble and chaff of "supply and demand." That is a political economy which forgets God, abolishes hearts, stomachs, and hot blood, and builds its world as children do, out of tin soldiers and blocks of wood. Here every man reads, votes, and carries arms. The physical force, the voting majority, and a large share of the intellectual ability, are in the possession of the employed. Hence such questions are far more complicated than in countries where despotism holds iron sway over disfranchised ignorance. Equally out of place and absurd is the argument that capital will only pay what it pleases, and labor must submit. That is slavery. The millions employed in mines, factories, and on railroads, have usually that one trade and no other; they cannot easily shift into other employments. Very few families of working-men have means, when turned out of work, to travel hundreds of miles in search of other employers; hence the majority of the employed are chained to one place and to one trade. Saying to such men, "You shall have no voice in fixing your own wages, and you shall take what is offered to you, or starve," is slavery. No

American will, or ought to submit to that. If the day ever comes when, by any means, Americans are obliged to submit permanently to that, a republic will here be impossible. The only just, safe, and lasting basis of peace is that which calls labor into conference, and allows it a full share in settling the rate of wages.

We abhor and denounce all violence, every assault on private right or property, on the liberty of the individual working-man, and above all on life. But these outbreaks are transient and exceptional. In spite of them every thoughtful man must rejoice that the laboring-men are awake, intelligent, and independent. We rejoice in the clear judgment which enables the workingman to discover the danger which threatens. We rejoice in his readiness to resist a state of affairs that degrades him, threatens to undermine republican institutions, and to condemn his children to want, ignorance, and dependence. It is one of the chief benefits of education, civilization, and progress, that they make, and are intended to make, such violations of right, such injustice and oppression, dangerous and almost impossible. The inevitable dangers (and there are inevitable dangers) which attend such injustice are enough to rouse the keenest anxiety of capitalists. That is spur enough to quicken their consent to do justice. We counsel working-men to frown on resorts to violence; it can only delay the remedy they seek. Let them rely on agitation, discussion, and on associations for mutual help and protection; but only such as discountenance violence and abstain from all interference with the rights and free action of individual workmen. Voters under a representative government, let them unite in political action, and appeal to the moral forces of the age. The necessities which underlie free institutions and the soundest maxims of political economy are their strong allies, and the conscience of mankind is on their side.

The duty of the Republican party is plain. It still holds within its lines all the elements which attract and deserve confidence; it still has the power to lead; only courage and decision are wanting. It should place itself at the head of the new movement. It cannot buy, but it can absorb, the new party. Plainly, now, the first duty is to take care for the material interests of the nation. If it were possible to rouse the public and begin at once a crusade to execute justice and save the Union, that, in this

crisis, would still be the first duty. Conflict of arms and bloodshed may, at any moment, reveal to blinded eyes this duty. But while this delusion of peace without purity, of peace not based on justice, lasts; while the South imagines the North a coward only because she is foolish, and the North accepts, in the South, a hypocrite for a brother, labor claims every ear and every hand.

Public opinion is too strong to be resisted; too wise to be long misled. The people, it has been said, do not see, they feel. They have felt the tyranny of a selfish system of finance which corrupted men by giving them free chance to steal. They are opening their eyes to detect its errors. to detect its errors. Sure as the rising of the sun, and calmly as morn ripens to noonday, they will get ready for that keener battle which is impending the battle for impartial liberty and equality before the law.

The white South hates universal suffrage; the so-called cultivated North distrusts it. Journal and college, social science convention, and the pulpit, discuss the propriety of restraining it. Timid scholars tell their dread of it. Evarts and his committee, appointed to inquire why the New York City government is a failure, were not wise enough, or did not dare to point out the real cause, the tyranny of that tool of the demagogue-the corner grog-shop; but they advise taking away the ballot from the poor citizen. No wonder the humbler class looks on the whole scene with alarm. They see their dearest right in peril. When the easy class conspires to steal, what wonder the humbler class draws together to defend itself! True, universal suffrage is a terrible power; and with all the great cities brought into subjection to the dangerous classes by grog, and Congress sitting to register the decrees of capital, both sides may well dread the next move. No doubt universal suffrage endangers peace and threatens property. But there is something more valuable than wealth, there is something more sacred than peace. As Humboldt says, "The finest fruit earth holds up to its Maker is a man." To ripen, lift, and educate man is the first duty. Trade, law, learning, science, and religion, are only the scaffolding wherewith to build a man. Despotism looks down into a poor man's cradle, and knows it can crush resistance and curb ill-will. Democracy sees the ballot in that baby-hand, and selfishness bids her put integrity on one side of those baby footsteps and intelligence on

the other, lest her own hearth be in peril. Thank God for his method of taking bonds of wealth and culture to share all their blessings with the humblest soul he gives to their keeping! The American should cherish as serene a faith as his fathers had. Instead of seeking a coward safety by battening down the hatches and putting men back into chains, he should recognize that God places him in this peril that he may work out,a noble security by concentrating all moral forces to lift this weak, rotting, and dangerous mass into sunlight and health. The fathers touched their highest level when with stout-hearted and serene faith they trusted God that it was safe to leave men with all the rights he gave them. Let us be worthy of their blood, and save this sheetanchor of the race-universal suffrage, God's church, God's school, God's method of gently binding men into Commonwealths in order that they may at last melt into brothers.

WENDELL PHILLIPS.

VII.

DEBTOR AND CREDITOR.

II. HENRY V. POOR.

I. R. P. BLAND, M. C.

I.

It is from the effect of monetary legislation upon the relation of debtors and creditors that the antagonism arises between the interests of the West and the East on questions connected with the currency. If there were no debts and no credits, it would be of little consequence what the volume of money was. But, under the economical conditions developed by modern civilization, the magnitude of the volume of money is of overshadowing impor

tance.

In his report (1791) on the mint to be established in the United States, and the coinage to be executed by it, Alexander Hamilton began by saying

"The general state of debtor and creditor; all the relations and consequences of price; the essential interests of trade and industry; the value of all property; the whole income both of the state and of individuals are liable to be sensibly influenced, beneficially or otherwise, by the judicious or injudicious regulation of this interesting object."

It was because he saw that the character of the metallic money to be coined would affect "the general state of debtor and creditor," and "all the relations and consequences of price," that he condemned a single metallic standard of either gold or silver, well knowing, to quote his language in another part of the same report, that "to annul the use of either of the metals is to abridge the quantity of the circulating medium.”

It is well known that the first step in the demonetization of silver in this country, which was taken in the coinage law of February 12, 1873, was understood, or even observed, by but very few persons. Even of those few, it is probable that a portion did