When an engineer designs a bridge which is intended to sustain a weight of eighty tons, he introduces a "factor of safety," say three or five, and makes the bridge strong enough to bear two hundred and forty or four hundred tons. The greater the calamity which would result from the breaking down of the bridge--the deeper the chasm which it spans, the swifter the torrent below--the larger the factor of safety. With many political institutions, likewise, the consequences of failure would be so disastrous that the statesman seeks to introduce a high factor of safety; but in the case of bimetallism no catastrophe whatever is to be anticipated, even in the event of failure. At the worst, after the drain of the dearer metal, in consequence of changes in the conditions of supply, is completed, the bimetallic country is simply in the same position with the countries of the single standard using the cheapened metal. While the process of substitution is going on, it sells the dearer metal at a premium; when the process is over, it is no worse off than it would have been had it originally selected as its sole money of full legal-tender power the metal which it has bought at a discount, and which other countries, perhaps its immediate neighbours, are still using. It is not the case of a country seeking to reject the cheapening metal, and to supply its place with the metal which is continually becoming scarcer and dearer.... There is all the difference, in the two cases, between going down hill and going up hill. Not only is no catastrophe involved in the failure of bimetallism through the exhaustion of the dearer metal, but it is always in the power of the Government to arrest the drain at any point without shock. Thus, in 1874, France and her monetary allies, seeing the prospect of a considerable drain of gold through the importation of the discarded and cheapened silver of Germany, and having decided, whether wisely or unwisely, not to prevent that drain, restricted the coinage of silver without repealing or suspending the law which made gold and silver legal tender indifferently at a fixed ratio. Two years later, finding that the forces operating to lower the value of silver were powerful and persistent, the coinage of silver was peremptorily stopped. Can one point to any sign that France has suffered any special injury to her trade and production from this act?...