will control the whole matter, being stronger than legal enactments or judicial decisions. Money is the universal medium or common standard which fixes the value of all other things that can be sold or bartered, and neither the congress of the nation, by the passage of a law declaring that paper shall be a legal tender, nor the supreme court deciding that such law is constitutional, can impart an actual value to such paper, because it is but a promise to pay money. They can no more accomplish this object than can the alchemist convert iron into gold. The only effect of this decision, as we have attempted to demonstrate, is to place the people more completely in the power of corporations. If the reader has followed us he will not fail to perceive that all the departments of the government are virtually controlled by the great anti-republican corporate interests now overshadowing and cursing the land; and that the supreme court of the United States, originally intended to be a check upon unconstitutional legislation, and to guard with jealous care the rights of the people, has become an instrument to aid this great power in its war upon the rights of the citizen; that by judicial construction of statutes involving the rights of corporations and the people, such decisions have been made as leave the people but little to hope for in the future, and induce the belief that the will of the court, and not constitutional law, is to be the "supreme law of the land." CHAPTER XXIII. BANK MONOPOLISTS--THEIR CONTROL OF THE CURRENCY. A BANKRUPT FINANCIAL POLICY. Gold and silver are and must remain the standard of values. This being true, any attempt to substitute any other standard unsettles values, and opens avenues for reckless speculation. Bank bills, or other promises to pay, are and always will remain unsafe as a money standard; especially when they cannot be exchanged for specie, save at large discounts. The policy of the government, of substituting treasury notes for coin, as legal tender, and then issuing national currency for general circulation by the banks of the country, has been effectual in preventing the circulation of coin, as well as the resumption of specie payment. No good reason can be given for issuing two kinds of currency, or for providing that one kind (treasury notes) shall be legal tender, and the other (national currency) shall be of less value, good in ordinary circumstances, but which no one is obliged to accept in payment of debts.