The Portland Daily Press

The Shoe and Leather Reporter insists that the policy of inactivity must be abandoned by the Treasury, and that the new Secretary must exercise his undoubted power to sell bonds for the purpose of procuring the gold necessary to prepare for resumption. There is scarcely any prospect of additional legislation, however desirable, in aid of resumption. The work must be done, if at all, with the powers already existing. These need to be intrusted to experienced hands. Had the whole matter been left in the hands of experienced bankers (as resumption always has been in previous suspensions, and would have been now but for the legal tender notes) there can be no reasonable doubt that specie payments would have been resumed within a few years after the close of the war. What the next Administration especially needs, says the Reporter, "is a Secretary of the Treasury conversant with business and the laws of political economy. The trained skill of such a man would supply to the financial operations of the Government an element in which they have long been deficient, but which cannot be spared much longer without jeopardizing the results already gained in the direction of currency reform."