d the extra session of 1893 to consider the money question.
Such a reflection might possibly assist him in fathoming the present
motives of the men who won in 1892 to achieve the gold standard and in
1896 to preserve it.

For the election of Mr. Cleveland was a carefully executed move in an
elaborate and merciless programme. The president of a national bank in
North Dakota, a man of character and thorough reliability, has
recently made public a conversation between himself and a prominent
New York bank president, held not long after that election, in which
the latter, whose institution was a member of the Associated National
Banks, declared in substance as follows: "We have just elected Grover
Cleveland President of the United States upon the express
understanding with us that the policy of the administration shall be
to uphold and advance the gold standard"; and he foretold, with
startlingly faithful prevision, the repeal of the Sherman purchase
law, the successive bond-issues, and the general and ruinous fall of
prices, which seem to have evidenced the strict performance of the
agreement by the party of the second part.

How persistently the power of the executive was used, and how
carefully the offices were dispensed, to influence Senators and
members of Congress against the Sherman law, were matters of ordinary
comment at the time. Meanwhile the banks were putting in motion their
peculiar and enormous persuasions. For months no man could go into any
bank in any State of the Union for any purpose without having thrust
under his nose, with a more or less pointed request for his signature,
a petition demanding the repeal of the obnoxious statute. Then, in the
latter days of April, 1893, on the stock exchange, there began that
concerted onslaught upon stocks and values, vaunted as an
"object-lesson" to the people, as a result of which within eight
months six hundred of the relatively smaller banking institutions of
the country went down, dragging with them fifteen thousand industrial
and business enterprises, involving a total loss of seven hundred and
fifty millions of dollars.

The object-lesson served its purpose. With the business world
shattered into fragments, enterprise stifled, and credit dead, a
terror seized upon the people. The opportunity for which the big
bankers had been coolly waiting had come. Cunningly and in many places
at once they started the cry that the Sherman law had caused all this
havoc, an