If in 1885 it was not practicable to secure the adoption of the bimetallic system, when silver was worth eighty-four cents per ounce, what is the prospect of its adoption when silver is worth only sixty- four cents per ounce, with an annually increasing product and a diminishing price? What remains? This, possibly: That the nations may agree to purchase each a per cent of a fixed amount of silver as the product of each year. This scheme might prove, and probably it would prove, to be only a temporary expedient. The enormous increase in the business of silver mining is evidence that the profits are far in excess of the profits that are gained in other pursuits. The increase in product is likely to be followed by a fall in price. Such are the resources of the earth that an increase in the demand for silver will be followed by an increase in the supply. Gold mining is obedient to the same law. From 1876 to 1894 the product increased 74 per cent. That ratio of increase is likely to continue. The world is not in peril of a gold famine. Gold as a currency, passing from hand to hand, will be used less and less. Substitutes, for which gold can be obtained, will be preferred. The volume of currency in a country is not limited by the amount of gold that a country may possess. It may increase the amount of subsidiary coin very largely, and it may add to the sum of paper money, provided that that paper money is always redeemable in gold. Nor does the quantity of gold in a country determine the price of commodities, except as that gold is a part of the total volume of the currency of the country. The volume of currency as a whole is the force by which the salable value of commodities is affected. In truth, gold plays a small part only in actual business. It is a regulator of business rather than an active instrument for the transaction of business. It is not an exaggeration to say that the use of gold in business is limited to a small fraction of one per cent of the aggregate transactions in countries where gold is the standard. It is not improbable that in the near future the world is to meet a surfeit of gold, as it is now meeting a surfeit of silver. Yet even then its capacity as a standard will not be affected. History does not carry us to a time when gold was not the recognized standard for the measurement of every other kind of property, and that not by one tribe or people only, but by mankind in every clime and in every stage of savageness or of civilization. As the Mint Bill and the demonetization of silver have occupied the attention of the country for a third of a century, and as there may be a revival of the controversy at a time in the future I have thought it wise for me to make a record of the facts in the most enduring form at my command.