The Chicago platform invites us to establish a currency which will enable a man to pay his debts with half as much property as he would have to use in order to pay them now. This proposition is dishonest. I do not say that all the advocates of the free coinage of silver are dishonest. Thousands of them--millions, if there be so many--are doubtless honest in intention. But I am unable to reconcile with any ideal of integrity a change in the law which will permit a man who has borrowed a hundred dollars to pay his debt with a hundred dollars each one of which is worth only half as much as each dollar he received from the lender. [Illustration: FRANK A. MUNSEY ] Dana’s opinions on political questions were more eagerly sought than those of any other editor after Greeley’s death, and the _Sun’s_ political news was complete; yet with Dana, and with the _Sun_, politics was, after all, only one small part of life. The whole world, with its facts and fancies, not the political problems of one continent, was the real field to be covered. Dana’s curiosity was all-embracing. After the _Sun’s_ financial success was assured he went abroad frequently, and saw not only western Europe, but Russia and the Levant. Of these he wrote in his “Eastern Journeys.” He knew a dozen languages. He conversed with the Pope about Dante and with Russian peasants about Tolstoy. His knowledge of Spanish, acquired early in life, made easy his travels in Mexico and Cuba. Everywhere he went he talked of freedom with its friends, and encouraged them. He knew Kossuth, Mazzini, Garibaldi, Clémenceau, Marti, and Parnell. At home, Dana’s amusements were chiefly literary and artistic--the study of languages, history, and _belles-lettres_, the collection of pottery and pictures. His Chinese porcelains were perhaps the best, in point of quality, in the Occident. “I am persuaded,” one critic said of them, “that Mr. Dana must have had a most profound instinct in relation to the whole subject.” After Mr. Dana’s death these porcelains, about four hundred in number, were sold at auction for nearly two hundred thousand dollars. In winter Dana lived in a large house which he built in 1880 at the corner of Madison Avenue and Sixtieth Street, and which held the art treasures that he began to gather in the first days of his prosperity. Here he kept his pictures, notably some fine specimens of the Barbizon school, and his books, which included some rare volumes, but which in the main were chosen for their usefulness.