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-mixing your metaphors somewhat, I fear, under the influence of a pardonable irritation -'the pig-shearing treadmill' of the novice who aspires to penetrate the mysteries of the Currency Question. I am, so you tell me, your very last card: and you play it, because, as you are good enough to say, you are quite sure I know all about it; and so I am to sit down at once and compile an epistle explaining it all by return of post.

Really, my dear Meg, it is very seducing to find you confiding so delightfully in me. I am verily afraid lest, after the fashion of your incorrigible sex, you should tempt me to make a fool of myself. Do you suppose that I shall actually dare to pretend without blushing to the wisdom which you lay with such flattering certainty at my door? to say I can honour the draft you have drawn upon me, and pay you, to the full extent of your credit, in gold? It would be much too pre

sumptuous, Meg, even in the sacred privacy of a letter. And yet in this case, since you command me to speak, I can honestly say, with Beatrice, 'amor mi mosse, che mi fa parlare.' There's a witchery and a fascination in Political Economy, as well as in a certain young lady I know of, which makes me a slave to her: she leads you ever onward, like the bird in the oriental story, which kept always just out of reach of the prince who pursued her for the sake of her talisman; nor at any time these many years, even though I had wished it, could I have abandoned my quarry for the fiend in the heart of me,' as Pushkin expresses it, 'drove me along,' and would not suffer me even so much as to rest and take breath, till I had exhausted the subject as well as my strength. 'Who will know too much, grows old soon,' says the Spaniard well, you shall at least have the benefit, Meg, of all my grey hairs.

To point out the cause of an error is halfway to the truth. Learn, then, Meg, that the prime cause of all the obscurity and perplexity besetting the problem lies in ourselves.

The root and core of the difficulties you have experienced, which render it, as you say, next door to impossible to make 'head or tail' of Bimetallism, is simply, an initial and radical error as to the nature and function of money; an error which, as Mr. Giffen informs us, is the 'accepted creed of economists throughout the world,' a received dogma of that Public Opinion, to doubt or deny which is heresy; one of the thirty-nine articles of that Economical Faith quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus: handed down from Adam Smith and the Fathers of the Catholic Economical Church in direct succession, and still reigning with despotic sway over her unsuspecting disciples. And thus it is, that

newspaper writers and leaders of public opinion think they have said everything and settled the question, when they pronounce Bimetallism to be an economic heresy.' They are perfectly right, Meg: but nobody speaks with such truth as the man who doesn't know what he is saying. Bimetallism is a heresy: but then Galileo was a heretic, too. Bimetallists, so Mr. Giffen informs us, are the detestation of men of sense. Curiously enough, so was Galileo. We must not appeal, my dear Meg, for the settlement of difficult questions to the opinion of Mr. Giffen's men of sense. The opinion of sensible men is the same, and yet different, in all ages: the individual specimens die, but the species remains. The sensible men of one age are carefully disclaimed by the sensible men of the next.

Five sixths of the 'demnition total' of our economical difficulty has been put there by

inferior thinkers, and maintained by the phalanx of sensible men. Quel imbroglio que l'economie politique! Ah! vraiment, s'il n'existait ni philosophes ni prêtres, il suffirait des economistes pour nous donner la mésure de la déraison et de la crédulité humaine! But what could we expect, in the name of all that is preposterous? We start from premisses palpably and wildly ridiculous, and then wonder, when we suddenly find ourselves landed in absurdities. 'Tis as though we should base our arithmetical calculations on the assumption that two and two are five. We carefully tie our ballast to the masthead, and when the ship suddenly turns turtle in a cap-full of wind, we go about exclaiming, Who would have thought it! Clearly the thing to do is to raise our centre of gravity and get rid of the wind. It was the wind nothing wrong here: we're all right: it's that infernal wind. Cut down our com

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