This talk of intrinsic value was not confined to Mr. Carlisle. Mr. Patterson, of Tennessee, and Senator Caffery, of Louisiana, were likewise guilty of it. It is, indeed, the characteristic folly of their school. Having destroyed the money demand for silver while adding almost incalculably to that for gold, they have caused an increasing disparity in the values of the two metals; and now, when it is sought to restore the parity by restoring the equivalence of use and demand on which alone it depends, they pretend to have discovered some inherent perfection in gold and an original sin in silver which forbid all attempts to reconcile them. In the face of monetary principles whose nature has been understood for more than two thousand years, and of historic and economic facts which every college freshman knows, Mr. Carlisle has the appalling audacity to use the following language: "Natural causes have separated the two metals, and while it is possible that natural causes may hereafter change their present relations to each other, it is certain that these relations cannot be changed by artificial means." It is difficult to speak with becoming moderation of such stuff as this; and it is really pathetic to see the dominant opinion of whole sections of the country taking its cue from men who assume superior airs and rebuke the presumption of thinking on the part of some millions of Americans, while they peddle such insufferable nonsense as this just quoted from Mr. Carlisle. "Natural causes" indeed, when we can turn to the statute books of half the world and put our fingers on the "artificial means" whereby the hoarders of gold have legislated demand into one metal and legislated it out of the other. Let once a wrong be achieved by artificial means, and instantly those who profit by it represent it as the inevitable decree of evolutional forces. "Natural causes," we are asked to believe, have made gold dear and silver cheap during a period when the cost of producing gold has been cheapened more than any other mechanical process; when both metals have continued on substantially their old relative planes of use in every respect save as money; when their relative production has been from three to twenty times less disproportionate than at any other similar period in the past four hundred years; and when in actual weight the stocks of coin and bullion available for coinage have risen from a proportion of thirty-two of silver to one of gold up to that of sixteen of silver to one of gold coincidently with a fall of the so-called market ratio from fifteen and one-half to one, when the mints were open to both, down to thirty-three to one when only the one can be freely coined. It is simply an incredible and impossible proposition.