His principal associates and counselors were two. The first was a great orator, who had spent most of his life as a missionary among an uneducated people who never had any property, and, of course, made no exchanges; and in this most excellent and practical school had learned all that could be acquired on this complicated subject. The second was a great athlete, who had performed for many years in the national circus, and had acquired great reputation by carrying weighty packages on both shoulders, labeled "domestic industry," but which in reality contained only pig-iron. About these two "every one that was in distress, every one that was in debt, and every one that was discontented gathered themselves," so that they soon had a large body of disciples. The first thing they did was to abuse poor old Robinson Crusoe, because he had advised his people, in his life-time, to make their money of gold (which can be only produced by labor, and not by hocus-pocus); and their currency of something that represented gold, and this, too, when he must have known that gold "was the machinery and relic of old despotisms;" [25] and they made no account whatever of the fact that he was the father of his country and lived in a cave. Next they declared that all the opinions heretofore accepted on this subject by the rest of mankind were fallacious; that nature had done its best to make the island an isolated community; that legislation had pretty effectually supplemented whatever in this respect nature had left deficient; and, therefore, that the wants of the island, in respect to money, currency, and every thing else, were so exceptional and peculiar that the accumulated experience of all the rest of the world could not be to them either applicable or instructive. All agreed that the pernicious theory taught by Robinson Crusoe, Friday, and other men of by-gone days and other countries--that money, to be good, ought to be a universally desirable commodity, and the equivalent of that for which it is exchanged--was the real source of all financial trouble; for was it not clear, that, if such were the case, those only could ever have money who, like the bloated wheat-holders, pig-holders, cattle-holders, house-holders, or bond-holders, had through labor previously come into possession of some desirable things, which they could give in exchange as an equivalent for money? while the true end of all financial reform, and the key to the terrible problem of poverty, was obviously to devise and bring into use that kind of money which those who had no wheat, pigs, cattle, houses, bonds, or other commodities, and were not able or disposed to acquire any through an exchange of their services, could have without difficulty, and in abundance. "We mean, therefore," said the orator-philosopher, speaking for himself and his colleague Friends of Humanity, "to have more democracy and less aristocracy in the money market; more money