open it to all the business of the country, but I would put the race between American skill and the skill of all the world, with the utmost possible confidence that, sustained by this Government in the race, we would win. It is in our people. With an equal chance we can beat them. But, with the present condition of things, a hope for the revival of American commerce is as idle a hope as ever entered the brain of an insane man. Our trade is falling off one or two per cent. per annum as we stand to-day. It was less this year than it was last. It was less last year than it was the year before. It will be less next year than this.

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"We want a navy, but we want something for it to do. We want a navy to protect the commerce, but we want a commerce in advance for the navy to protect, and we want a commerce that shall not be one of favoritism; a commerce that shall not benefit one section at the expense of another, but one that shall be equal and just and generous and profitable to all. You will never get it by making this nation a tributary to Great Britain. You will never get it by banishing the art of ship-building from among our people. You will never get it by discouraging all possible aspirations for maritime and commercial supremacy, by a public proclamation from Congress that after nearly a century of gallant struggle, in which more than three-quarters of the time we were

ahead in the race, on account of an accidental mishap that put us behind, we of to-day, not having the nerve or the sagacity of those who went before us, sank before the prospect, and asked other nations to do for us what we have lost the manhood and the energy to do for ourselves."

There is nothing of the spread-eagle in this. It is the langauge of a statesman who wishes practically to benefit his country, who is not only proud of her resources, but wishes to see them developed, and who knows that a great people should not remain supine in the race for peaceful supremacy on the globe.

In the same way he appealed to a proper national pride, when, in 1878, as a friend of bi-metallic currency, he withstood not only the advocates of the single gold standard but those of the unlimited coinage of the depreciated dollar, and urged the coinage of a silver dollar of equal value with that of gold. He showed that it would not only tend to restore silver for international exchanges, but that it would "insure to our laborers at home a full dollar's pay for a dollar's worth of work," a matter always of deep concern to him. On this point he further said:

"And I think we owe this to the American laborer. Ever since we demonetized the old dollar we have been running our mints at full speed, coining a new silver dollar for the use of the Chinese coolie and the Indian pariah-a dol

lar containing 420 grains of standard silver, with its superiority over our ancient dollar ostentatiously engraved on its reverse side. To these 'outside barbarians' we send this superior dollar, bearing all our national emblems, our patriotic devices, our pious inscriptions, our goddess of liberty, our defiant eagle, our federal unity, our trust in God. This dollar contains 71⁄2 grains more silver than the famous 'dollar of the fathers' proposed to be recoined by the pending bill, and more than four times as many of these new dollars have already been coined as ever were coined of all other silver dollars in the United States. In the exceptional and abnormal condition of the silver market now existing throughout the world, we have felt compelled to increase the weight of the dollar with which we carry on trade with the heathen nations of Asia. And shall we do less for the American laborer at home? Nay, shall we not do a little better and a little more for those of our own blood and our own friends? If you remonetize the dollar of the fathers, your mints will be at once put to work on two different dollars; different in weight, different in value, different in prestige, different in their reputation and currency throughout the commercial world. It will read strangely in history that the weightier and more valuable of these dollars is made for an ignorant class of heathen laborers in China and India, and that the lighter and less valuable is

made for the intelligent and educated laboring man who is a citizen of the United States. Charity, the adage says, begins at home. Charity, the independent American laborer scorns to ask, but he has the right to demand that justice should begin at home. And in his name, and in the name of common sense and common honesty, I ask that the American Congress will not force upon the American laborer an inferior dollar, which the naked and famishing and degraded laborers of India and China refuse to accept."

MR. BLAINE'S Sympathy goes naturally, and has always gone, to the workingman. He comes from a place and from among a people where honest labor is considered a badge of honor, and where the maxim, "If any man will not work, neither shall he eat," is thoroughly believed in. He has himself spent a life of constant exertion, either in public or private employ, and none of the pains or the pleasures of such a life are unknown to him. The phrase "workingman's friend" has been so abused by demagogues that Mr. Blaine has never put forward a claim to it, or paraded himself in that character; but his adherence to the cause has been steady and unostentatious. He has, in fact, felt himself one with the toiling millions, and has spoken as one of them, as it were in his own behalf as well as theirs, and never as if condescending from any height above them.

The result has been a ready and cordial sympathy between himself and those of his fellowcitizens who eat their bread in the sweat of their face, earning a livelihood with active brain, or