ever known in history. The public and private debts of the American people amount to about forty-five billions of dollars.* Of this debt less than ten per cent is held abroad. Most of the foreign holding is in Great Britain. Yet by the bond of this ten per cent the United States has become an appanage of Great Britain. The independence which we thought we had achieved a hundred and twenty years ago and which we supposed we had confirmed fourscore years ago has been reconverted into a miserable dependency which might suggest to a pessimist that it would have been better never to break with our good mother at all! The present aspect of the world is that of one centralized power, having its seat in London, with outlying dependencies. India with nearly four hundred millions is one dependency; Australia with four millions is another dependency; Canada wth six millions is a third; the United States with seventy millions is a fourth; the states of the Latin Union are the fifth. Germany and Russia are flattered with the belief that they are members of the league; but as matter of fact they are only Cambacérès and Lebrun in the consulate. The First Consul-and the only one of any importance-has his headquarters in the Bank of England. It is now only a question how the robbers who have despoiled mankind in the two civilized continents by means of the Bond and the Dollar are going to get off with their swag. They must have a little time and opportunity. In order to secure these, they cajole the nations with pleasing delusions and fancies. One of these fancies is impending universal war. War is an exciting circumstance, and the prospect of war serves to distract the attention of peoples from the wrongs which they have suffered. The rumor of world-wide war is the substance of the daily news. People read it and believe it; Shylock is in ecstasies over the success of his ruse, and if he thought he could sell more bonds he would plunge all nations into a bloody and exterminating conflict. Another one of the illusions is the factitious discovery of gold. The propaganda having its headquarters in London and its American branch in William *In the spring of 1895 the gold propaganda sent out from New York a number of distinguished advocates to teach the people how business is reviving, how the financial question is solved, how silver is dead, and in particular how easy and admirable has been the change from the bimetallic basis of currency to gold monometallism. In this interest Mr. Chauncey M. Depew appeared at Detroit and delivered an oration in which it were hard to say whether the wit were more stale or the facts more false. He showed that it was easy for the American people to extricate themselves from debt by the standard of gold, for the reason that the public and private indebtedness of the people is only fourteen billions of dollars. One might regard this statement as being interested and excogitated from the prejudice of the orator, but for the suspicion that he may have obtained his figures from Upton's financial statistics in the Census of 1890! Street, New York, has been engaged during the year 1895 in the dissemination of the news of gold discoveries in all parts of the world.* South Africa is teeming with gold; the mountains of South America are founded on gold, and the outcroppings of it are seen in many parts; the Australian hills are made of gold; California is nothing but gold; the Alaskan mines are also rich in gold; the very sea-bottom on several coasts reaching out for leagues is a mire of gold; new discoveries are made in Colorado and Arizona and New Mexico and Georgia. Added finds are heralded with every mail. Soon it will be that gold shall be a drug in the streets; it shall be heaped in crates, from which the passerby may help himself and his friends. The price of gold will thus be brought down, and We, the Managers of the Enterprise, will have to adopt strenuous measures to prevent the overcoinage of gold as money. Strange that all this ineffable lying should be propagated by the press and be believed by an intelligent people! Another pleasing fancy of the Goldites is the great and prosperous revival of business. Why, here is a marvellous paradox. Business, according to the great disinterested organs of public opinion, revives and does not revive! Manufactures flourish again and do not flourish again! Enterprise once more goes forward with a bound, and enterprise does not bound forward at all, but remains inert and dead! The farmer with his fat-lean kine rejoices and weeps! The collapsed bins of ten thousand farmyards are bursting with high-low wheat! The gold organ performs this paradox for the reason that it must. According to the organ, Of this propaganda the London Bankers' Magazine is the principal organ. Its last article on the subject before the publication of the present number of the ARENA is" A Flood of Gold Coming.” According to this disinterested organ the danger at present is not a scarcity of gold, but the peril that the commercial and industrial world will soon be overwhelmed with an avalanche of that metal. All the mines of the world are spouting streams of it. It is doubtful whether coinage can absorb the output; there is cause for alarm lest the fall in the precious stuff shall make it necessary for "the business interests of the world" to place rigorous limits on its coinage. "To-day," says the magazine, "it is not a scramble for gold, but a coming glut of gold, that gives cause for anxiety... The golden stream has but just started to flow in on us, and the full force of its rising tide is yet far off. Year by year it will swell in volume, as the mining mania which is being let loose in every part of the world becomes more and more prolific. The world's production of gold has almost doubled itself within the short period of seven years.... Recent progress is nothing compared with what has been predicted for the next few years." Strangely enough, the article then goes on to show that a large part of "the golden flood" is derived from tailings! "In some cases," says the article, "as much as a fourth of the gross income is derived from tailings." Miraculous it is that while the out-pouring flood of gold from all the world is about to deluge the commerce and industries of mankind and entail a depreciated dollar, the miners of South Africa, even in the Randt, are represented as toiling with cyanide among the tailings to get "a fourth of the gross income." As matter of fact, this article in the Bankers Magazine was written for American consumption. It was intended to be copied, as it has been copied, by the metropolitan press, and thence diffused to all American newspapers gratis for their encouragement! The chairman of the county committee is thus enabled just before the fall elections to tell his followers that a flood of gold is coming! the adoption of the Wilson Bill in 1893, in place of the wartariff schedule that had been aggravated to an inflammation by the McKinley Law, prostrated all enterprises, ruined all industries; and neither can the one revive nor the other ever flourish again, until the flamboyant protective scheme shall be restored. Therefore, saith the capitalistic press, business does not flourish and cannot flourish again until the wrong shall be righted, after the next presidential election. But on the other hand, crieth the organ, the adoption of the single gold standard instead of the bimetallic standard of the constitution has restored confidence, and with the restoration of confidence, behold how business revives! All enterprises rise from the dust; all manufactures rekindle their fires and pour forth their treasures. Hence business, in the same act and by the same token, both revives and does not revive! The proclamation of prosperity and of industrial despair goes forth from the same gold organ on the same day! The fact that the alleged ruin of American industry by the passage of the Wilson Bill and the alleged revival of all American industries by the coïncident passage of the Gold Bill of 1893 do not consist seems not at all to trouble the advocates and owners of the honest dollar! All this furnishes instruction for the people and amusement for the few whose understandings cannot be darkened with the lying obfuscations of a goldite newspaper. A final method for the confirmation of the crimes that have been committed against the whole industrial and commercial world is the possession by the Gold Trust of the political organizations in every country where such organizations exist. In America the political parties differ from one another only in the degree of their subserviency to the money power. It always comes to this in the last stage of partisan degeneration. The political parties to-day fawn around the money power just as they fawned around the knees of the slave oligarchy in the ante-bellum days. Our parties also differ a little in their dread of the plutocratic bludgeon. For if we offend plutocracy, who shall pay our bills and load our caissons with the munitions of war? The elections held in the United States for several years have had no other significance than a blind attempt of the disorganized and confused people to punish the authors of their distresses, first one and then the other. The people are still groping in this manner. They are apparently afraid to rise in political insurrection against their masters. They follow their local leaders and the monitions of a politi cal press that seems to have gone over almost wholly to the enemy. I do not know a great newspaper that in its tone is heartily friendly to the common people. The local leaders in politics follow the great leaders, and they the greater, until we arrive at the supreme management; and that, in both the dominant parties, is identical in intent and character. An attempt is made to create fictitious issues, upon which to induce the people to divide and agitate. One boss says, Lo, here; and another boss says, Lo, there.* Now it is the revival of the tariff question; now it is the mythical Monroe doctrine; now it is the annexation of Hawaii or Cuba; now it is Venezuela; now it is Armenia; now it is this, and now it is that, in the expectation that the people may be deluded therewith and lose sight of the fundamental question of their wrongs, until what time they shall be completely bound and translated out of the character of freemen. How much further this malevolent and ruinous work can be carried on before the end come no man may well foretell. The winter snows whiten the landscape. A measure of forced activity has been produced in the business world. After the horrors of three years' prostration, the haggard workman returns downhearted to his tasks. A crippled tenant husks the corn in a field that was his own. He is an old soldier! The farmer and the mechanic labor on in hope deferred that a better day is coming. Whether it will come depends upon the people themselves. In one of the inspired passions of the French Revolution, the democrats made a statue like a titan, and set it up near where the Bastile had stood. They called it Le Peuple Hercule. It was the People Hercules. It represented the great ideal in its strength and majesty. Whenever the spirit of such an ideal shall repossess our American citizenship, the end will come, and the wrongs which the people have suffered by the Bond and the Dollar will be righted. The creed of the Rev. Hosea Biglow is no longer satire, but history. That creed, victorious alike over liberty and law, has become incarnate in the political boss, whose faith and that of his prototype are one: "I du believe thet I should give Wut's his'n unto Cæsar, Fer it's by him I move an' live, I du believe thet all o' me Doth bear his superscription, Will, conscience, honor, honesty, For" Cæsar" read Shylock. MAETERLINCK AND EMERSON. BY HAMILTON OSGOOD. As one studies the character of Maeterlinck he becomes more interesting. By his plays alone he could not fairly be judged, for, notwithstanding the intentions, literary and mental, which are to be discovered in them, these plays fail to reveal the inner life of the man. They show him as a literary impressionist, fond of the psychological; but save. perhaps to one who knows him well, they do not disclose that which would be considered the spiritual life of this ardent soul. His essay upon Ruysbroeck offers a better means of knowing him. Here one finds himself in touch with what is truest and simplest in Maeterlinck. In spite of his youth, he seems to have attained to clear vision with reference to life. One feels that, practically, Maeterlinck has discovered that the events of life, while they make up the sum of life, and while in themselves they are shadows of deeper things, are not life itself, and that the "me" of every individual is in unceasing contact with the source of all life. Indeed, much that he has written would give one the impression that Maeterlinck is a man of mature years, a mere man of books and seclusiveness. See, then, what he really is as discovered by Jules Huret, who gives this racy sketch of him: Surprise. Aged twenty-seven years, rather tall, shoulders square, a blond moustache closely clipped, with regular features and a youthful ruddiness of cheek and clear eyes, Maeterlinck exactly realizes the Flemish type. This, united with a very simple, rather timid manner, without gesture, but also without embarrassment, at once arouses a feeling of very agreeable surprise. The man, correctly dressed, wholly in black, with cravat of white silk, does not play the part of the precocious genius, nor of the mystic, nor of anything else. He is a modest man and a sincere. But this charm has its reverse. If I do not succeed in making my host forgetful that he is being interviewed, a thing which terrifies him, I shall win nothing, or almost nothing, from this tranquil, square-shouldered man, by my inquiries. A quarter of an hour has scarcely passed when I realize that it will not do to talk either of himself or of others, or so very little. To talk of things in very brief phrases, to respond to my questions in monosyllables, a slight gesture, a toss of the head, a movement of the lips or of the eyelids-such, so long as he feels that |