To insure prosperity we ought to have something permanent, something substantial. Then the business of the country will conform itself to the facts and regulate itself accordingly. This panic (of 1873) was exceptional, as indeed all panics are. A panic among men is precisely like a panic among animals. I once saw 2,000 horses stampede, and they were just as the same number of thousands of men would be in a panic. It is the feeling of animal fear, and one encourages the other, and so it goes on until it becomes a perfect insane rush for something, nobody knows what. Prior to this late panic, as is well known, many of our capitalists had over-invested in wild railroad schemes; they had undertaken to do impossible things; when the panic struck them it ought not to have had the least effect outside of Wall street and operators in railroad stocks. But the panic swept like a tornado all over the land, affected values everywhere, values of all kinds. Whoever had money in bank sought to draw it out and hide it away. The panic was universal, and yet this nation was never more prosperous than it was the day before the panic struck. And to-day there is as much money in the Union as there was then. Every dollar that was here then is here now. Besides, the enormous borrowers, the men who would pay any price for money--one-half per cent. a day, one per cent. a day, or any other given price--have failed and gone out of the market. And now the money is seeking the legitimate channels of commerce for interest and use.... The best time for the resumption of specie payment that has occurred since the suspension was in 1865, at the close of the war, when gold had fallen from over 200 to 122. In a few days values had shrunk, and the people of the nation were comparatively out of debt, and were ready then for a resumption of specie payments, but the government was not. The government owed more than $1,000,000,000, that was maturing daily in the shape of compound interest notes, seven-thirties and other obligations that must be funded or disposed of. Hence the government was not prepared for specie payments at that time, although the people were.... From that day to this we have been drifting and floating further and further away every hour from the true path--the resumption of specie payments. I have advocated from the first the earliest possible payment in coin. I believe there is no other standard of value that will stand the test, and I believe the time has arrived, or very nearly arrived, for coming to it. I have not the same timidity in fixing a date that some of my friends on this floor have. I believe that if we were to resolve to-day that we would resume the payment of our greenbacks in coin on the 1st day of January, 1875, and authorize the Secretary of the Treasury to borrow $100,000,000 in coin to be used in the