Mr. St. John says that the farmers are spending ten dollars an acre to get eight or nine dollars an acre. What farmer in the United States can tell how many dollars he spends on an acre? What is the sense of these pretendedly accurate figures? But, if they had sense, what would be the gain of cutting the dollars in two? If the farmer spent twenty silver dollars on an acre and got back sixteen or eighteen, how would he be benefited? The dollars of outlay are of the same kind as the dollars of return in any case. If it is true that the return does not equal the outlay, it must be on account of some facts of production, and it requires but a moment’s reflection to see that changing the currency in which outlay and income are reckoned cannot change the relation between the two. A dispassionate view of facts will go to prove that the world is reasonably and ordinarily prosperous at the present time, except where particular classes and industries are affected by special circumstances, as some classes and industries are being affected at all times. The land-owners of western Europe are in distress on account of the competition of new land, with cheapened means of transportation, but now we are told that the holders of the other side of the competition, the land-owners of the new soil, are victims of distress. It must be, then, that too much labor and capital are being expended on the soil the world over, and that, too, in spite of all the protective tariffs drawing people to the textile and metal industries. Our silver men say that this is not the correct inference. They say that the people on the new land suffer because the prices are set in coins of gold and the debits and credits are kept in terms of those coins. The prices are fixed in the world’s market in gold. They will be so fixed, whatever we may do with our coinage laws. If the proceeds, in being brought home, are converted into silver value, a new opportunity for brokerage and exchange gambling will be given to the hated bankers and brokers of Wall Street. That is the only difference which will be produced. It would be far more sensible to say that distress is produced by doing the business on the English system of weights and measures, in bushels and pecks, and that prosperity would be produced by doing it on the metric system, in litres and hectolitres, for that charge would at least be harmless. Our distress could all be dispelled in a week by an act of Congress making all contracts, beyond political peradventure, that which they are in law and fact, gold contracts.