proposcs to prohibit all other currency, we should then be left with no currency at all.
The 3.65 bond scheme, therefore, instead of being a scheme for providing the country with a currency, is perfectly suicidal, so far as furnishing a currency is concerned. It is simply a scheme for providing a paper currency for circulation by withdrawing all such currency from circulation! It is absurdity run mad.
II.
But the advocates of the scheme will say that it provides that these bonds may be reconverted into currency. Yes, it does indeed provide that they may, but not that they must, be thus reconverted. And it offers no inducements whatever for such reconversion; because, if reconverted, the currency will then be worth no more in the market than the bonds are worth as investments; since all that will give the currency any value at all in the market will then, as before, be the simple fact that it (the currency) is convertible back into the same bonds from which it has just been reconverted!
The bonds are to be holden by men who preferred the bonds to the currency, when both had the same value in the market. And now the scheme contemplates that the country will go without any currency at all, until these same bondholders shall change their minds, and prefer the currency to the bonds, when both have still the same value in the market! Who can tell when the bondholders will do that? The bonds are their estates, their investments, on which they rely for their daily bread. They are the estates which they have preferred to all others, as a means of living. To presume that they will reconvert them into currency, is just as absurd as it would be to presume that a man who has just bought a farm, and relies upon it for his living, will sell it for money that will enable him to do nothing else so good for himself as to buy back the same farm that he parts with.
III.
But General Butler, who, I believe, claims to have been the author of this scheme, says that, “in case of a scarcity of money,”
