possible use for silver but strengthen the hands of those governments which have dishonored it, contribute to the support of gold mono-metalism, and thereby augment the burden of our national debt.

It may be said that silver money paid out on account of the national debt would be immediately returned through the custom house and little increased circulation be thereby obtained. But to this it may be replied that silver money paid in this way will remain in circulation as long as if paid out in any other way; and as long as any other kind of money would remain in circulation; the length of time will be determined not by the quality of the coin so long as parity is maintained, but by the prevailing requirements of business. All kinds of money including not only gold and silver, but their substitutes, national notes, bank bills, certificates, both gold and silver, in times of stagnation in business, are accumulated in the treasury and in public and private banks, lying idle and unproductive, because the diminished business of the country cannot use them profitably. It is therefore no objection to the use of silver money or to the law which provides for coining it, that a large amount of it lies in the vaults of the treasury, or that it is impossible to keep in circulation all that has been coined.

The issue of certificates, limited by law to actual deposits of silver coin, is one of the least objectionable and most effective means to promote the use of silver money. It has the advantage of allowing the use of large sums without burden and the further advantage of saving the loss by abrasion which follows the use of the coin itself. It also gives to the government the benefit arising from the loss of certificates, which will inevitably amount to a considerable sum, and probably sufficient to cover the cost of storing the coin and issuing the certificates.

To what extent silver money may be issued, either in coin or by certificates of deposit, consistently with the concurrent use of gold coin, can only be determined by experience.

The existing conditions governing the solution of this problem have never prevailed before, and they are changing from day to day. Among them may be considered the volume of the world's business, its activity, the facilities and methods of local and international intercourse, the contrivances for the substitution of credits for money, the action of foreign governments, the changing customs of trade in Asiatic countries, the increasing demand for silver in those countries as their population and trade increase, and the growing home demand which would follow the abandonment of paper legal-tender, the reduction of bank issues, and the use of silver coin or certificates in payment of the national debt.

The policy of the nation on this question is therefore tentative, involving in its successful management an intelligent study of all the conditions which control it, and a broad and liberal view of our national interests. The experience of other countries justifies the conclusion that a much larger amount of silver money may be used advantageously in the United States than is now used. Not only France, which employs more than twice as much silver money as this country, but Germany, which is preeminent

ly hostile to silver, and other important nations furnish evidence that the amount of silver money in use here is far below the capacity of our people to employ with advantage. The rapid growth of our population also, of necessity, demands an increasing amount of money in circulation and especially that kind of money which passes from hand to hand in small sums. This is peculiarly the province of silver money. The facilities offered by modern suustitutes for money, such as checks and bills of exchange, serve the needs of large business transactions, and of the great bulk in value of the exchanges of the country. But they are not available in the daily transactions of the wage earners and of those, numerically the greater part of the people, who keep no bank accounts.

The field for the use of silver money is capable of great enlargement as population increases, and a country like ours, covering a vast area and sparsely settled, requires a larger per capita amount of silver money in circulation than smaller and more thickly settled countries where the people have readier access to the conveniences of modern commercial life. It would appear, therefore, that financial legislation in the United States should aim to increase the demand and the use for gold and silver money throughout the country and to expand its volume in proportion to the growth of population and business. It should also encourage the free issue of national bank currency under similar rules to those which now prevail to secure the holders, and facilitate the easy and rapid expansion and contraction of its volume in harmony with the fluctuating requirements of trade.

Such a policy, intelligently and persistently followed, would give to the country a broad, substantial basis of metallic legal tender for its business transactions, and through the national bank currency furnish the means to maintain easily that equilibrium between the demand and the supply of money which is essential to continuous national prosperity.

THE PARITY OF MONEYS AS REGARDED BY ADAM SMITH, RICARDO AND MILL. By S. DANA HORTON.

[ABSTRACT.]

THIS paper was prepared in May, 1888, as an open letter, answering a question of a member of the English Royal Commission on Gold and Silver. This Commission consists of twelve members, men of great distinction and competence, including prominent members of either House of Parliament, and has been engaged for two years in an inquiry into the whole matter of gold and silver money, the evils of the present situation, whether affecting England or India, and the possible remedies for these evils. The principal proposition for permanent amendment of the present disturbed monetary situation of the world is that of a triple or quadruple alliance of the great monetary powers, to assure equality before the law to the two

money-metals. This remedy was first projected in Europe and America, in 1876, when the great breach of parity between silver and gold occurred. A treatise of that year "Silver and Gold” (R. Clarke & Co., Cincinnati), by the author of this paper, established in his view the conclusion that it was the interest of each pation to promote such a mintage union, and that it was in the power of the United States to assist materially in bringing about its establishment. This policy was in the end adopted by Congress. Free coinage of silver was defeated by the Alison amendment of the original “Bland Bill” and the second section of the act of February 28, 1878, invited the nations to a conference on the subject. Subsequent acts reaffirmed this attitude. The history of the monetary conferences of 1878 and 1881 is familiar. Failing of immediate success in one sense, they exerted, and still exert, influence as a means of educating the nations to work together. They remain a power, also, through the literature they called into exist ence, including their reports, repositories of knowledge, which have been gratuitously distributed throughout the world.

In Europe the issues connected with the proposal of the United States have been the object of thoughtful study, and the occasion of a widespread revision of economic doctrine in which earnest representatives of the policy of the conferences have taken an important part.

The present paper is the latest of a close succession of works from the same author bearing upon this question. It deals with the central point of interest and of debate, which unite or engage all who think or speak of the silver question. Indeed, the parity of silver and gold makes up in one sense the sum of the whole matter. Monetary controversy since the panic of 1873 is, in fact, but a story of parity, a question of parity once enjoyed, and of its loss-about 1873. When is it to be regained? According to the delegates of the United States (of 1878 and 1881), it is to be regained when England shall be converted to see her own interest, and join the other nations in restoring it. When this occurs the number of great powers required to make the alliance for intermetallic parity will have been made up. It thus appears that the question addressed to Mr. Horton provokes a hearing of argument on the main issue, before a court of high jurisdiction.

Is it clear that the power of government goes to the extent of enabling them to establish a stable ratio between silver and gold?

In his affirmative answer, the writer puts aside, as trivial and visionary, reasoning which the public has been wont to hear reiterated in support of the negative. Much of this reasoning, it appears, grows out of confusion between the economic and the political sides of the question. His affirmative applies to the question, as an economic question, and is stated in terms of the law of supply and demand. Parity, he says, is the inevitable result of a wise regulation of demand operating upon a limited supply. The supply of gold and silver is limited by their nature; what is needed are appropriate laws of nations to regulate their relative demand; that is to say, laws which give equality to the metals in their character as money, equality of legal privilege. Let the chief nations-including England, under the

advice of the royal commission — adopt these laws and the thing is done.

The only directly opposing arguments, to which the writer gives attention, are those which tend to "conjure up in some minds a mirage about the limits of supply." These arguments, he avers, belong to the order of gratuitous prophecies. The annual increment of the stock of silver and gold always has been a minute fraction of the stock already in men's hands: and there is no ground for supposing it will be anything more.

He then approaches his main theme which relates to the point of clearness. "How does it come to pass that doubt can exist on a point so simple and so clear as that parity can be so produced and maintained."

The doubt has existed in great force, and still exists in some measure. Why is this? There must be some cause at work to blind the minds of the learned, so that evidence and argument, such as that already adduced, are not appreciated.

It is all the more strange that doubt should exist when we observe its habitat. England, for example, is the scene of a series of remarkable parities. Ample instances of limited supply and of legal regulation of demand are in sight in England. Parity extends from bronze pennies to silver shillings, gold sovereigns, small notes, large notes and bullion. Nowhere is there a breach of the parity. And yet the doubt exists about the possibility of parity between silver and gold in spite of the fact that the very basis of discussing that possibility is a proposed legal regulation of demand, which shall be coëxtensive with the larger field in which the money metals are used.

What is the source of this doubt? It must be traced in the teaching of the leaders of economic thought; there must be a fashion of incorrect thinking about money and monetary laws and about the demand they regulate. Hence the review of the ideas of Adam Smith, Ricardo and Mill about parity.

They wrote while silver and gold were equally money, while phenomenal intermetallic parity was maintained by equalizing laws. But no effort had been made to ostracize one of the metals, and hence they were not imperatively summoned to investigate the cause of this parity. They omitted to investigate the question. They took silver and gold for what they were worth, without curiously asking the why and wherefore. Hence certain flaws in their teaching. In their action as political advisers about money, they were in a general way well disposed to both metals. But in their doctrine, in the monetary department of their systems of economic knowledge, defects appear. There is a lack of cohesion or junction between parts. The principles of monetary law, the nature of the institution of money, are slighted; and it is from this standpoint alone that the phenomenon of parity can be understood.

Modern econ

These defects are a natural outgrowth of circumstances. omy arose as a reaction against an earlier system of economic learning, which is known since Adam Smith's day as the Mercantile or Commercial System. The central idea of this system was that national wealth consisted in national money; the important thing was, not the capital and the labor, not the savings and the skill of the citizens, but the cash they held.

This being the ancient view, it appears that gold and silver were, so to speak, in the very citadel of that doctrine of state interference, which Smith and his successors sought to overthrow and destroy. By a natural exaggeration all monetary law was drawn into the struggle, and a certain neglect of it, or even antipathy for it, was generated, which extended itself to the present day. In earlier days little practical harm came from this neglect; the thinker's good sense being a safeguard against the error of his theory. The harm came when disciples proceeded to build their schemes of governmental action upon the oversights of the masters.

It is this process which the writer seeks to expose and to check.

In a critical review of representative passages (of the works, especially, of Ricardo and Mill) the writer presents evidence of the defects thus pointed out. These evidences are brought in contrast with what he has from time to time advanced as the main generalization upon which amendment of the doctrine of the older economist must be based. The tendency in the past has been to dwell exclusively upon one phase of money, namely Voluntary Payment, while what he names the Institution of Obligatory Payment has to an important extent been ignored. Yet the latter, he avers, is as it is always has been, a vital factor in civilization; the power of the state to establish and regulate money is a power always essential to the life of the state. It is because they lacked this legitimate foundation of principle that the accredited systems of knowledge about money, as set forth in economic treatises, have been largely infected with the unpractical or the visionary. They are, as it were, honeycombed with metaphors.

Witness the popularity of the fallacy "Trade in Barter," or of the deceptive analogy between the pound sterling and the pound Troy or the imperial gallon.

This flaw in economic theory has tended to incapacitate the mind from accurately weighing the evidence and argument which establish the certainty that parity of the metals can be maintained by concurrent laws of nations. But for the little that remains of this unpractical and visionary element among the representatives of science the economic question is everywhere settled.

The political question remains. But it must no longer wear the robes of science; it must appear in its proper character as a political question. Will the leading nations of Europe pass the laws, the principle of which the United States proposed for their consideration in 1878 and 1881? Upon this question the world awaits the action of the British Royal Commission on Gold and Silver, and of the British Parliament.

THE FOOD SUPPLY OF THE FUTURE AND THE DOCTRINE OF MALTHUS. By Prof. W. O. ATWATER, Middletown, Conn.

[ABSTRACT.]

THE current ideas, area and soil production are based upon agricultural experience. Modern science is showing that the fertility of the soil as ordinarily tilled is not the necessary limit of its capacity to produce plants.