would destroy our credit and stop the process. The very
doubts created by him and Pendleton have already damaged the
government very largely. Confidence is so sensitive that when
prominent men like Ewing and Pendleton talk as they do, the injury
is immediate.

"The whole difference between the amount of silver and gold at this
moment is eight per cent., so that the payment of the debt in silver
would lessen the burden of the debt eight per cent., but under the
funding operations, which would be entirely destroyed by anything
that alarmed the market, we are enabled to save thirty-three per
cent. Whatever may be our right to pay our bonds, either in
greenbacks or in silver, this question of expediency, as you very
properly said in one of your speeches, is to be considered apart
from the question of legal power.

"Refunding would go on with greatly accelerated speed if we could
sell bonds for greenbacks. We make discrimination against the
greenbacks by refusing to take them in payment of bonds. If I had
the power to sell bonds for greenbacks I could make greenbacks
equal to coin with scarcely a perceptible change. That is the
advice of the most sagacious men in the country. I know it. There
is talk about the bondholder being a privileged person. He ought
to be so no longer, and the moment that a bond could be bought with
currency at par in gold, all discrimination in favor of the bondholder
would disappear.

"The differences among Republicans about silver will be settled by
the use of the silver dollar to the extent that it can be kept in
circulation at par with greenbacks, and is a pure question of
detail. The difference in the Democratic party about interconvertible
currency is vital, and Ewing's doctrine overthrows the whole
Democratic theory of finance before the war.

"The existence of the national banks is a question simply of policy
and not a question of principle. The right conferred upon banks
to issue circulation is not conferred for their profit, but for
the public convenience, and all Republicans can agree that that
right should never be permitted to exist except when it is for the
public convenience. The office of bank notes is simply to supply
the ebb and flow of currency made necessary by the wants of business.
The United States cannot lend United States notes, and therefore
cannot meet this want. Ewing proposes to destroy the whole national
bank system, interwoven with all the business of