I have discussed my subject as if gold and silver stood on the same level of desirability for money, and as if there were no choice of convenience between them. Such is not the case in fact. It will be observed that gold and silver never have been used together. Gold has generally been subsidiary, being employed for large transactions. With the advance of prices and the increase in variety of commodities, as well as in the magnitude of transactions, nations have passed from copper money to silver and from silver to gold. This advance is dictated by convenience. Silver is no longer as convenient a money for civilized industrial and commercial nations as gold. We therefore see them gradually abandoning silver, and we saw the Latin Union set up a bar against silver so soon as the operation of the double legal tender threatened to take away gold and give it silver. Whether this movement from silver to gold can be accomplished without financial convulsions I am not prepared to say, especially in view of the extent to which the nations have depreciated gold by paper issues, but I regard the movement as one which must inevitably go forward. The nations which step into the movement first will lose least on the silver they have to sell. The nations which use silver until the last will lose most upon it, because they will find no one to take it off their hands. If we now abandon the gold standard and buy the cast-off silver of the nations which have been using it and are now anxious to get rid of it, we voluntarily subject ourselves to that loss, which we are in no respect called upon to share. The Dutch at New York kept up the use of wampum longer than the English in New England. When the Yankees were trying to get rid of it, they carried it to New York, adding some which they manufactured for the purpose, and they carried the goods of the Dutchmen away. The latter then found that they held a currency which they could only get rid of at great loss and delay to the Indians north and west of them. The Yankees thus early earned a reputation for smartness. The measure now proposed is a complete parallel, only that now this nation proposes to take the rôle of the Dutch. We shall have to give our capital for silver, and after we have suffered from years of experience with a tool of exchange inferior to that which our neighbors are using, we shall have to get rid of it and buy the best. Then we shall incur the loss--to all those who have anything--of the difference between the capital we gave and that which we can get for the silver. The dreams of getting silver and keeping gold too, so as to have a concurrent circulation, are all vain. At the rating proposed there is no difference of opinion on this point amongst any persons at all qualified to give an opinion. The real significance of the propositions before the country is to make us one of the nations to take silver in the distribution I have described. The notion of a coinage union is impracticable.