He says that “it is amongst the first principles in finance that the value of each dollar, expressed in prices, depends upon the total number of dollars in circulation.” There is no such principle of finance as the one here formulated. The “quantity doctrine” of currency is gravely abused by all bimetallists, from the least to the greatest, and it is at best open to great doubt. When the dollars in question are dollars of some money of account which can circulate beyond the territory of the State in which it is issued, the quantity doctrine cannot be true within that territory. It may be noted, in passing, that this is the reason why no scheme of the silver people for manipulating prices in the United States can possibly succeed. Silver and gold will be exported and imported until their values conform throughout the world, and prices fixed in one or the other of them will conform to the world’s prices, after all the trouble and waste and loss of translating them two or three times over have been endured. The quantity doctrine, however, means that the value of the currency is a question of supply and demand, and everybody knows that to double or halve the supply does not halve or double the value, or have any other effect which is simple and direct. If it did have such effect speculation would not be what it is. Mr. St. John goes on to argue that our population increases two millions every year, on account of which we need more dollars; that the production of gold does not furnish enough to meet this need, and that, therefore, prices fall. This argumentation is very simple and very glib. Prosperity and adversity are put into a syllogism of three lines. But, if we can avert the fall in prices and adversity by coining silver, it must be by adding the silver to the gold which we now have. “High” and “low” prices are only relative terms. They mean higher and lower than at another time or place; higher and lower than we have been used to. If misery depends on ten-cent corn we are advised to cut the cents in two and we shall get twenty-cent corn and prosperity. Corn will not be altered in value in gold, or outside of the United States, and, as all other things will be marked up at the same time and in the same way, its value in other things will not be altered by this operation. When we get used to twenty-cent corn it will seem just as low and just as “hard for the debtor” as ten-cent corn is now. Then we can divide by ten and get two-dollar corn, by adding free coinage of copper. When we get used to that we shall be no better satisfied with it. We can then make paper dollars and coin them without limit. Million-dollar corn will then become as bitter a subject for complaint as ten-cent corn is now. The fact that people are discontented is no argument for anything.