Weekly Independent

VOLUME 28.

VILAS WAS IGNORANT.

An Eastern journal publishes the following which tells a whole lot:

"It is little wonder," said a well-known English traveler, who was in the Senate gallery yesterday during the delivery of Mr. Vilas' speech, "that the public is puzzled as to currency theories when Senators pay so little attention to the fact."

Senator Vilas had just declared that gold was everywhere "money" when Senator Teller said; "No, in India, for example, it is not available for money any more than diamonds are." The Wisconsin Senator replied:

"Always these silver advocates have to ride off to some country where we are in the dark as to the facts,"

The English visitor said that not only was gold coin not money in India and the East, but he said: "You could not get a breakfast for a sovereign in many of the out of the way towns in British India. And further, in the Eastern provinces of Russia the peasantry will not even take Russian gold coin, except at an actual discount, notwithstanding the gold coin is quoted at a 40 per cent premium to-day over the paper rouble. And if I were asked what coin circulated at par over the largest area in the world, I should say the Mexican silver dollar. Indeed, I don't know any country, whether civilized or savage, except a part of Africa, where it is not convertible at par. In Ceylon it is current money, in the Malay Peninsula: it is the currency unit of China; any bank and any bourse in Europe will take it. Why is it so popular; why has it superceded throughout all China the trade dollar of France and the United States? I can give no other reason than this one: that it is legal tender at its home and the Mexican mints are open to coin it in unlimited quantities."

"If I may take Senator Vilas as a representative of gold monometalism then I think Sir George Chesney's recent statement is justified in your country, also--that the world is divided into two schools, the bimetallists and monometallists, into those who understand the question and those who don't."