We hear fierce denunciations of what is called the “money power.” It is spoken of as mighty, demoniacal, dangerous, and schemes are proposed for mastering it which are futile and ridiculous, if it is what it is said to be. Every one of these schemes only opens chances for money-jobbers and financial wreckers to operate upon brokerages and differences while making legitimate finance hazardous and expensive, thereby adding to the cost of commercial operations. The parasites on the industrial system flourish whenever the system is complicated. Confusion, disorder, irregularity, uncertainty are the conditions of their growth. The surest means to kill them is to make the currency absolutely simple and absolutely sound. Is it not childish for simple, honest people to set up a currency system which is full of subtleties and mysteries, and then to suppose that they, and not the men of craft and guile, will get the profits of it? THE DELUSION OF THE DEBTORS[38] Fifty years ago a political agitation was started for the annexation of Texas. As the enterprise appeared like a barefaced piece of land-grabbing, it was necessary to invent some historical, political, and moral theories which would give it another color. One such theory was that Texas had properly belonged to us, but that it was given away by Monroe and Adams in 1819. Therefore the project was presented as one for the _re_-annexation of Texas. THE RE-MONETIZATION OF SILVER. An attempt is now made to impugn the coinage act of 1873 under various points of view, in order to lay a foundation for the claim that it is only sought now to re-monetize silver. Not a single imputation on the act of 1873 has ever been presented which will stand examination, but, if that were not so, that act was like any other act of Congress which has become the law of the land, and under which we have all been obliged to live for twenty-five years. We cannot go back and undo the law and live the twenty-five years over again. All the mistakes and follies of the past are gone into the past for all classes and all persons amongst us. The men of the past must be assumed to have acted according to their light, and we who inherit the consequences of what they did must make the best of both the good and ill of it, as the case may be, or as we think it is. If now we make a new coinage law it must stand on its own merits, and on the responsibility of the men who make it, now and for the future. All references back to 1873 are idle and irrelevant.