The cases in which legislation acts on value are all cases of monopoly. Such is the case with token money; such is the case with irredeemable paper. As with every other monopoly, the successful manipulation of these monopolies consists in controlling supply, to fit the supply to the demand at the price which the monopolist wants to get. The history of every monopoly shows the great difficulty, I might say, in the long run, the impossibility, of doing this. The bimetallists propose not to act on the supply, and so create a monopoly, but to act upon the demand. This is a new exercise of legislation, different from any yet tried, and not guaranteed by any experience. Now to act upon the demand is, in the phrase of the stock brokers, to make a corner, that is to buy all that is offered at a price. Stock gamblers do this so as to sell out again at an advance to those who are forced to buy. If there are none who are forced to buy, then those who bought above the market have lost their capital. The propositions of the advocates of the alternate standard and of bimetallism are alike in proposing that all civilized nations shall combine to make a corner on the falling metal. Whether that is a worthy undertaking or not I will not stop to inquire. It is evident that the nations of the coinage union would have no one on whom to unload after they had bought, and that there would be an inevitable loss and waste of capital in the transaction. This, however, is not all. A corner is effective or not according to its scope. It must embrace the whole object to be raised in price, and above all it must act upon a limited amount which is not fed from any new source of supply. A corner on the precious metals is not to be made effective even by a combination of all civilized nations. In my opinion there is a grand fallacy in the notion that a coinage union would do what France did, only on a larger scale. Wolowski saw France, lying between Germany, a silver nation, and England, a gold nation, carry out the compensatory operation, and he inferred that all nations could agree to do the same, more widely, more easily, and with wider distribution of the loss. It seems to me that there was an action and reaction here between members of the group of nations which one can easily understand, but that if all nations joined in the system, the alternation would not work at all for want of a point of reaction. If all nations agreed to join the corner on the falling metal, they could not all bring their new demand to bear on the new supply at the same time. As the mines are limited and local, a new supply would touch the market only at one point. Hence the coinage union implies no aggregation of force at all. Make the union embrace the whole world, and the effect is just the same as if there were none at all, the matter standing simply on the natural laws for the distribution of the precious metals. Control of demand by a corner or of supply by