Mr. Adams possesses a very intimate knowledge of finance, and there are many of his discussions on this subject into which only an expert would be competent to enter. Nevertheless, on certain financial and economic questions, touching matters open to discussion by the man of merely ordinary knowledge, his terminology is decidedly vague. This is especially true when he speaks of “the producer.” Now the producer, as portrayed by the Populist stump orator or writer of political and economic pamphlets, is a being with whom we became quite intimate during the recent campaign; but we have found it difficult to understand at all definitely who this “producer” actually is. According to one school of Populistic thinkers the farmer is the producer; but according to another and more radical school this is not so, unless the farmer works with his hands and not his head, this school limiting the application of the term “producer” to the working-man who does the immediate manual work of production. On the other hand those who speak with scientific precision must necessarily class as producers all men whose work results directly or indirectly in production. Under this definition, inventors and men who improve the methods of transportation, like railway presidents, and men who enable other producers to work, such as bankers who loan money wisely, are all themselves to be classed as producers, and often indeed as producers of the most effective kind. The great mass of the population consists of producers; and in consequence the majority of the sales by producers are sales to other producers. It requires one set of producers to make a market for any other set of producers; and in consequence the rise or fall of prices is a good or a bad thing for different bodies of producers according to the different circumstances of each case. Mr. Adams says that the period from the middle of the twelfth to the middle of the thirteenth centuries was an interval of “almost unparalleled prosperity,” which he apparently ascribes to the expansion of the currency, with which, he says, “went a rise in prices, all producers grew rich, and for more than two generations the strain of competition was so relaxed that the different classes of the population preyed upon each other less savagely than they are wont to do in less happy times.” It is not exactly clear how a rise in the prices both of what one producer sells another, and of what he in return buys from that other, can somehow make both of them rich, and relax the strain of competition. Certainly in the present century, competition has been just as severe in times of high prices; and some of the periods of greatest prosperity have coincided with the periods of very low prices. There is reason to believe that low prices are ultimately of great benefit to the wage-earners. A rise in prices generally injures them. Moreover, in the century of which Mr. Adams speaks, the real non-producers were the