Let us look a little further into the absurdities over which American statesmen are so vehemently wrangling. Our government assumes the old time function of all governments to make and regulate the currency or money for the transaction of business--a mere convenience for the measure of values in buying and selling--in another way a thing performing functions similar to the yard-stick in measuring, and the great statesmen are wrangling over the problem of what particular material that convenience shall be made. And our nation, through Congress and the President, is ever tinkering, changing, altering, and reversing regulations concerning this "value measurer"--this convenient representative of property, and the basis of all commerce, gold, silver, copper, nickel, and paper to-day, and on this basis contracts and multitudinous transactions are based; then apparently that confusion and ruin may follow, an act of Congress may be passed to-morrow changing the whole thing by demonetizing one or remonetizing the other; and the government finally opens a junk-shop, and is engaged actively in the "second-hand" trade, or is in sharp competition with the rag-picker. And our great political educators fall to wrangling about a proposition, that could be paralleled only by some phenomenal crank beating up recruits for a new party upon a platform that all yard-sticks must be made of hickory wood, and he shall be deemed a counterfeiter who dares to use any other, and the length of the yard-stick must be flexible so that "a yard shall always contain a yard's worth of cloth." The children open a play store, and there the legal tender for all goods is pins, where the size of the pin or the exact composition it is made of are never considered. There is, to my mind, no question but the children should teach our great statesmen some of the fundamentals of common sense. These are specimens of the economic problems evolved from our hundred years of voting experiment--the ripened fruit of self-government. Books and papers are filled with discussions of whether both gold and silver should be legal tender for debts or only gold. And the rank sophistries that mark the flood-tide of a campaign discussion either of this or the problem of taxation are surely to be considered among the curiosities of our civilization. Just why men should range themselves on respective party lines on these questions and shut their eyes to evils that are eating their way to the heart of government and that unchecked must end in common ruin, passes comprehension.