“We find ourselves confronted,” he said, “by a peculiar condition of monetary affairs and of the circulating medium. We have had for the past few weeks industrial depression and widespread commercial disaster throughout the country, coupled with a buoyant stock market and a rapidly increasing supply of money. This unnatural situation has come about by means quite unprecedented in our financial history. It is a situation so important in all its bearings upon the material welfare of the whole country that it demands our most earnest consideration. The Clearing House Committee of the New York banks believes it is imperative to prepare some general policy for meeting the crisis which the present anomalous condition threatens. So we have invited you, Mr. Secretary, and you, gentlemen, to meet us here for an informal consultation. We thank you for coming and we hope you will contribute freely of your advice and knowledge. May we hear from you first, Mr. Secretary?” There had been hardly a hint in the chairman’s brief remarks of the real object of the meeting, but that was scarcely to be expected. Every one waited with interest for what the secretary of the treasury might say. Drawing a memorandum slip from his pocket, that gentleman responded: “I quite agree with your chairman that the financial phenomena which now absorb the attention of the entire country demand of the managers and students of our monetary system the most careful examination. I thank you for the privilege of meeting you for that purpose. No facts or figures need be quoted to prove the depression which has ruled for months in industrial and commercial circles. With that side of the question we are powerless to deal directly. We must confine ourselves more exclusively to the financial phase of the subject. There we have a strange paradox. You know what has taken place in the stock market. The increase in the quoted market value of bonds and shares listed in the New York Stock Exchange since the middle of December amounts to fully $2,000,000,000. The changes in the circulating medium have been even more surprising. There has been deposited in the government Assay Office in this city for smelting into standard bullion during the past three months no less a sum than $211,000,000. This, as you all know, is something altogether unprecedented. I think I am justified in saying at a private meeting called for this purpose that nearly $200,000,000 of this gold was deposited by a single firm. The work of the mints is just as significant. The amount of gold offered for coinage under the Free Coinage Act during the same period has exceeded $170,000,000. Three months ago the amount of gold in actual circulation in the country was $474,000,000; now it has risen, or it will as soon as the mints have finished the task imposed, to $644,000,000. This means an increase in the total circulating medium of fully ten per cent, or nearly three dollars per capita.