e we
draw the line. This is what Marsh Murdock had in his mental view when he
said at the St. Louis Convention, "You want to own the country and run
it too." But the veteran editor of the _Eagle_ has changed his mind and
consented to being "run."

You have bought the leading papers, caused our editors to "change their
minds," flooded the country with a trashy literature that is an insult
to our intelligence, and provided funds to pay third-rate preachers for
preaching to us a religion which we do not want. We are not rich, yet we
are able to pay for our education and our religion--if it is a kind that
will be of any use to us.

We do not fear the result of our experiment. If we fail, the same old
squeeze will continue; if we succeed, there is a prospect of relief.
Without variation, there is not even a prospect of bettering our
condition. If we should succeed in creating that financial paradox, a
fifty-three-cent dollar, we are such political heretics as to prefer
that kind of a dollar to none, or to "confidence." We have unbounded
confidence in the dollars which jingle in our pockets, but very little
in those which exist only in the imagination, and are represented by
stocks, bonds, checks, drafts, clearing-house certificates, and other
devices, which always fail to perform the function of money in the last
extremity, when money is most needed.

Do not allow yourselves to be terrified at the ghost of a silver dollar,
for the ghost of it is all that will ever trouble you. In the event of
free coinage, the trains going East will not be loaded with silver
dollars to pay off old mortgages. I have seen a statement in Eastern
papers to the effect that we wanted cheap money with which to pay our
debts. It is a base slander; every intelligent Western man knows that,
whatever happens short of the miraculous, only a small share of our
mortgage debts will be paid.

All the holdings you now have in the West, new and old taken together,
are not worth fifty-three cents on the dollar; and you cannot now in any
way realize that much from them; and if your present policy is
indefinitely continued you have no prospect of ever realizing
fifty-three per cent on your investments. If, then, you should be paid
in silver dollars, or if a larger share of the loans should be paid
under the new conditions, you would be a gainer and not a loser by the
change. It seems to me that an increase in the volume of money and
rising prices are the op