Every few years our industrial system gets the jim-jams. Capital flies to cover, factories close and labor goes tramping across the country seeking honest employment and receiving a warm welcome--from militia companies with shotted guns. Cheerful idiots begin to prattle of "over- production," the economic M.D.'s to refurbish all the old remedies, from conjure bags to communism. They all know exactly what caused the "crisis" and what to do for it; but despite the doctors the patient usually--survives. And the M.D. who succeeds in cramming his pet panacea down its throat claims all the credit for the recovery. We are slowly emerging from the crash of '93, and the cuckoos are cock-sure that Cleveland hoodooed with that financial rabbit-foot known as the gold-reserve--that a country fairly bursting with wealth was saved from the demnition bowwows by the blessed expedient of going into debt; that labor found salvation by shouldering an added burden in the shape of interest-bearing bonds. Hereafter when a burro tries to lie down beneath a load that's making him bench-legged, we'll just pile a brick house or two on top of him, and, with ears and tail erect, he'll strike a Nancy Hanks gait and come cavorting down the home stretch. When a statesman can see such things as that while wide awake and perfectly sober, he ought to consult a doctor. No wonder the Democratic party spilt wide open--transformed from an ascendent sun into a bifurcated Biela's comet, wandering the Lord knows whither. The gold reserve, we are told, is to "protect the credit of our currency." Protect it from whom? You and I are making no assault upon it--wouldn't hurt it for the world. When we get a paper or silver dollar we don't trot around to the treasury to have it "redeemed" in a slug of yellow metal--we make a bee line for the grocery store and have it redeemed in a side o' bacon. Who is it that chisels desolation into the blessed gold reserve--the so- called "bulwarks of our currency?" The fellows who want bonds--the capitalistic, the creditor class; the men who own the mortgages and have millions of dollars corded up in bank--the men who have most to LOSE by any bobble in the credit of our currency. And every time the capitalist tries to hoist himself with his own petard, the administration smothers the blaze with a block of interest- bearing bonds. If he wants to make a sky-rocket of himself, let him kerosene his coat-tails and apply the match. If the gold reserve were really necessary to the credit of our currency, capitalists would no more make war upon it than they would bestride a buzz-saw making a million revolutions a minute. Instead of systematically draining it they would, whenever it struck "the danger-line," gather all the gold they could get and send it on to Washington. The capitalists are not crazy; they've simply got a soft snap in that "bulwark" business and are working it for an it's worth.