owners of the world will found
a few libraries, build a few marble mausoleums for themselves, and
sally forth to establish a stock exchange in Mars! That done,
interplanetary wars may be engendered, bonds on the solar system may
be issued and bought at half price, a gold standard of values may be
fixed on the basis of the pound sterling good from the sun out to
Neptune, and the inhabitants of the worlds, either by arms or by
journalism, may become the helots of consolidated wealth enthroned as
the governing power of the universe.

THE REFORM CLUB'S FEAST OF UNREASON.

BY HON. CHARLES A. TOWNE,

_Chairman Provisional National Committee Silver Republican Party._

On Saturday evening, April 24, 1897, at the Waldorf Hotel, New York,
there was held a political banquet intended as a most impressive
function, but which has passed into history as a very ridiculous one.
Big with self-complacence and puffed with pride, as it appeared in the
brilliant lights and gorgeous appointments of the palatial
supper-hall, within twenty-four hours the lacerating indignation of
Mr. Watterson and the trenchant raillery of Mr. Bryan had let the
tumid pretentiousness all out of it, and it had collapsed into a
flaccid and "innocuous desuetude." The "star-eyed goddess" turned her
back upon it, the "wild-orbed anarch" snapped his fingers at it, and
even everyday Mrs. Grundy laughed it to scorn. Projected with the most
alluring and satisfying expectations, the feast has dwindled to the
memory of a sad mistake in the mind of every man that assisted at it.
Planned as a sort of coronation ceremony, its completed performance
unaccountably wore the complexion of belated obsequies irreverently
disturbed by the guffaws of the multitude.

But the aspect of this banquet as a piece of ill-conceived political
strategy that never was formidable, or as a rite in the ceremonial of
a hero-worship that is as inexplicable as inopportune, does not now so
much concern me as does its office as a dispenser of misinformation
and unsound philosophy, which are always dangerous. Many who condemn
the folly of it as a move in practical politics nevertheless loudly
commend the economic doctrines it contributed to spread. But inasmuch
as, in my opinion, the science it taught is as bad as the politics it
practised, I propose to call attention to a few of the arrogant
assumptions and mischievous theories that found emphatic and repeated
expression at this feast.