1892-3 they had increased to one hundred millions, and for 1896 it is estimated they will be over one hundred and fifty millions, while imports from the United States are falling off. Our gold dollar being convertible into two Mexican dollars is bringing in an enormous amount of capital from the United States for permanent investment in Mexico. It being unprofitable to send Mexican silver to the United States, it is being invested in new enterprises in Mexico, thus aiding in the wonderful development and prosperity now obtaining in that country. Furthermore, many wealthy Mexicans, having fixed incomes, formerly preferred to live abroad in the United States and elsewhere, but the depreciation of their silver incomes has driven them home, where silver remains at par, and thus a not inconsiderable addition is made to the wealth of the country.

The price of labor in Mexico has always been absurdly low, owing to its quantity being in excess of the avenues for employment; but the prosperity brought about by the causes above enumerated, and the manufactories, railroads, and many other new enterprises are gradually creating a demand for labor, and slowly but surely raising the price of wages, though they are still very low.

As above stated, if the American people were not the most patient in the world, they would not have thus submitted to this enormous and unjust transfer of wealth from the millions of wealth-producers to the handful of the idle rich. Those who have thus pillaged us, elated with the success of their plans, now threaten to still further contract the currency by retiring the greenback, and thus still more to increase the value of the dollars which the people must pay and they must receive. Should that plan succeed, the next step would be to declare that gold is depreciated by the opening of new mines and to insist on more grains of gold being put into the dollar. There is no limit to the exactions of avarice save the refusal to submit to them. Those who think that even that limitation is impossible might learn a lesson from Mexico.

The Catholic Church, by three centuries and a half of a policy as deliberate and as carefully planned as that of the monopolies and the money power in the United States to-day, came to own absolutely one-third of all the property in Mexico and controlled the balance. The masses were kept in ignorance, and the leaders and intelligence of the country were intimidated or bought. But there comes an end to such things. In 1859 the property of the church was confiscated. The church party called in the English,

the Spanish, and the French, and the latter gave them an emperor. But the French were driven out, the emperor was shot, and to-day throughout the vast territory of the Mexican republic, nearly four times as large as France or Germany, the Catholic Church does not own a foot of soil or a dollar of any property. The very church buildings, hoary, some of them, with nearly four centuries of use, belong to the government, and services can be held in them only by permission of the authorities elected by the people. Not a priest can walk the streets in his official robes. Mexico remains Roman Catholic in her religion, but when the alternative was presented whether the church should own the country or the country should own the church, Mexico, in spite of centuries of veneration for religious authority and the influence of consolidated wealth and the ignorance and poverty of her masses, was able to vindicate the rights of the people.

What this priestly monopoly was to Mexico the money power is to the United States. The multi-millionaires, the bondholders, the trusts and monopolies already own over one-third of the property of our country and are reaching out for the rest. Many leaders they nominate and elect to office, others they intimidate or corrupt. But our people, while patient, are not ignorant, and if the course of the monopolies and combinations continues unchecked they will wake up some morning to find, as the Catholic Church did in Mexico, that the sovereign people own the country and all that in it is. The Catholics in Mexico venerated the church fully as much as we ever did the right of individual ownership of any species of property; but the welfare of the people is the highest law, and when that becomes imperilled, as it was in Mexico, by the money power in the shape of the church, and as it is in the United States by the same deadly enemy in the guise of multi-millionaires and monopolies, the manhood, the brains, and the honesty of the people will assert themselves, and we will not go down under the same enemy that destroyed Rome and so many other nations in the past. The world is older and wiser.

The gold dollar in the United States may well be called a mythical dollar. Not one man in a hundred ever sees one. It is not used to buy corn or wheat or cotton or flour or railroad tickets or dry goods. It is only for the sacred use of the idle rich when they wish to measure by a high standard, doubled in value, the principal and interest of bonds. which, on their face, by the contract, are payable in coin— i. e., either gold or silver.

In drawing these lessons from the past experience and the present prosperity of Mexico, there are those who will say that Mexico is inferior to the United States in education, in civilization, and in many other respects. To some extent this is true-and so much the worse for the objectors. For if Mexico, in spite of all these disadvantages, is prosperous and going forward by leaps and bounds, with her standard of values maintained at the same point, so much greater is the damnation of the men who, notwithstanding our great and manifest superiority, have brought the blight and curse of a long enduring depression upon us by robbing the wealth-producers in the interest of the wealth-consumers through the device of doubling, by surreptitious legislation, the value of the dollar. And if Mexicans, with three hundred and fifty years of priestly rule, three hundred of which were also under a foreign yoke, and fifty more passed amid civil dissensions, could assert themselves and throttle the gigantic money power which oppressed them, what cannot, and what will not, seventyfive millions of the foremost people on the earth be able to do when satisfied that they owe it to themselves and their posterity to break the yoke which binds them?