gold as "British money." Great fools, indeed, the British would
be if they did not fight for a gold basis, for by reason of it they get
twice as much of our wheat, meat, and cotton for the $200,000,000 per year
we have to pay them in interest. According to the Chancellor of the
Exchequer, the world owes England $12,000,000,000, on which she realizes a
little over four and a half per cent., or pretty nearly $600,000,000 per
year. Fully that, if we add income from property her citizens own in this
and other countries. On the day we demonetized silver, that $600,000,000
could have been paid in gold in the port of New York with 450,000,000
bushels of wheat; to-day it would take 900,000,000 bushels. In short, the
amount of grain England has made clear because of the rest of the world
adopting monometallism would bread all her people, feed all her live
stock, and make three gallons of whiskey for every person on the island.
Why shouldn't they take what the world willingly gives them? I have my
opinion, however, of the common sense of a world which does things that
way.

=We want money that is equally good all over the world.=

There is no such money. The coin we send abroad is only bullion when it
gets there, and most dealers prefer government bars. The exchange must be
calculated exactly the same whether we use gold, silver, or paper in our
domestic trade; and this notion that we "should be at a disadvantage in
the exchange" is a delusion. The variations in the value of the greenback
during our war era were calculated daily, and prices in this country rose
or fell to correspond. It must, I say, be calculated just the same in gold
or silver, and any smart schoolboy can do it in a minute on any
transaction.

=What I mean is that the silver dollar is worth only 50 cents in gold.=

And by the same token the gold dollar is worth 200 cents in silver. The
answer is as logical as the quip, and neither is worth notice. Such a
process merely assumes an arbitrary standard and measures all other things
by it, as the drunkard in a certain stage of intoxication thinks that his
company is drunk while he is duly sober. And, by the way, where do you get
your moral right to say that a dollar which will buy two bushels of wheat
or twenty pounds of cotton is any more honest than one which will buy one
bushel or ten pounds? Is it because with the dear dollar the farmer must
work twice as long to pay off a mortgage, that the interest paid