of mankind has chosen it for that purpose, and there is no other instrument available. A few countries still cling to silver, but they all show signs of adopting the richer metal. Thus gold becomes more masterful. Those who put themselves in hostile array, denounce it as costly and doubt the value of discovery and production, are bound to provide, at least, in theory, some other tool for settling the world's commerce. The era of rude barter has passed away. The stress of trade insists upon the best machinery. In the years, 1889 to 1904, we exported in gold $890,231,329, and imported $845,452,765. From 1890 to 1896, inclusive, every year showed an excess of exports to an aggregate of $273,961,117. In only two years since then, 1900 and 1903, were the exports greater than the imports, $5,802,143 in all, while in the other years of the period the imports were $234,984,696 in excess. In the fiscal year of 1904, in spite of exceptional foreign payments, the imports surpassed the exports by $17,595,382. So the exports for the whole period were the greater by $44,778,564, and this is only equal to our own production of the metal for seven months. More significant still it is only 5 per cent of the outward movement for the period.

Yet the full sums of imports and exports were carried across the ocean, at great risk, heavy cost for freight, and not a little loss by abrasion. Why should this treasure be carted back and forth between nations, as the banks of this and other cities used to deliver money to each other? Is it not possible to frame a system by which only the differences may be paid in metal at proper intervals? Surely it would be cheaper to pay the balance than the gross sums, as the clearing houses daily testify. Why cannot an international clearing house be organized? Perhaps jealousy will forbid the selection of a single city for the purpose, as the Greek cities were rivals for the deposit of the offerings to Apollo. The international organization may well have its vaults in London, Paris and Berlin, as well as in New York, and the treasure can be divided in the ratio of the gold of the several countries. The certificates of the four vaults can be interchangeable.

American finance does not stand alone, a Teneriffe in midocean, a Shasta or Ranier or Mont Blanc rising in solitary

majesty among their ranges. It is the vital current of the activity of the people. Its strength is not in theory or in petty technicalities. It is strong with the brain and brawn of 82,000,000 citizens; with the varied resources of mine and soil and forest and running waters; with the sheep and horses on many ranches and the cattle on a thousand hills; with coal and iron and all their products; with wheat and corn and sugar and cotton; with the inventive minds and skillful fingers of efficient artisans; with forge and factory and dynamo and motor, and not least, with school and college, with university and church. Financial strength is in wealth of every kind, but not less in the purest morality and the worthiest character.

EARLY AMERICAN FINANCIERS.

BY GEORGE ALFRED TOWNSEND.

[George Alfred Townsend ("Gath"), journalist and author; born Georgetown, Del., January 30, 1841; graduated from Philadelphia High School, 1860; became a journalist in 1860 with the Philadelphia Inquirer, and later with the Philadelphia Press and New York Herald; war correspondent New York World, 1864-5, where he made a reputation as a descriptive writer; described Austro-Prussian war for the World, 1868. Author, Life of Garibaldi, Real Life of Abraham Lincoln, The New World Compared with the Old, etc.]

Poets are not of much interest in our day because poverty, tranquillity, dignity, humility, the cardinal virtues of many centuries, have lost their charm. To do anything purposeful now one must collect wealth first.

In doing so, the purpose generally loses its soulfulness. The wife of our bosom says: "O, don't be notional! You can't make the age." We harden by our material fiction. As Bill Travers said, when trying to light his gas with his wife's comb, which he thought was matches: "Tooth is stronger than friction."

Some men, like Dr. Schliemann, succeed at money, and go and dig Agamemnon up. Others, like the sturdy president of the Chicago university, make letters a character by saying to their rich patrons, "Give me $2,000,000 to start with, or I'll stay a poor tutor."

Indeed, wealth exercised to great ends is poetry. The transmuting power to give Cinderella a glass slipper, Aladdin a magic lamp or the Christian his heaven, are imagination with a financial requital.

Science has changed the theme of poetry from barbaric, causeless riches and display to enlightened power and systematic utility.

Hence the bank is the muse, the banker is the good fairy, the God of the living world is the financial essence and trinity which hears the popular prayers and answers them in showers of treasure.

We pray for a railroad, not to the same old moral overlooker. We pray for waterworks to the banker god. We ask

not upon our knees, but with our most wistful and worshiping intelligence that the concrete wisdom of the lords of exchequers will rescue us from panic, and our words are still the same: "Lord, help thou mine unbelief."

It was this feeling of pious homage Daniel Webster paid to Alexander Hamilton in the metaphor of God appearing to Moses, of Jesus raising Lazarus.

"He smote the rock of the national resources and abundant streams of revenue gushed forth. He touched the dead corpse of the public credit and it sprang upon its feet. The fabled birth of Minerva from the brain of Jove was hardly more sudden or more perfect than the financial system of the United States as it burst forth from the conceptions of Alexander Hamilton."

Having applied the religious figures of both the Jewish and Christian scriptures to his hero, Webster added from the mythology of the ancients another religious tribute. The country heart of Webster, his luxurious blood, his waste of revenue, his literary incapacity to do more than earn fees and salaries, had yet the justice and discernment to see that the founder of the American treasury was a universal providence.

So all those who continue Hamilton's task, the wise merchants who were Hamilton's consulters and their continuers to the present day, the savers of money and the utilizers of savings, the upright and public hearted bankers, the youth who join their seniors in holding up the hands of men of fiscal supervision, are of the new elect and patriotism of the saints.

Before Hamilton existed business had its public opinion and general convictions. But the exact mathematics, the precise and long projections, the Scotch and the French combination in Hamilton, enabled him to do the work of John Law, his Franco-Scotch predecessor, upon the more certain resources of the United States.

Law, the founder of the bank of France, died about thirty years before Hamilton was born; he was of the gambling class of Cammack, Villard and Woerishoffer, but he had studied the bank of Amsterdam on the spot, while a very young man, and it was as old as Jamestown and Captain John Smith, and

nearly a hundred years older than the bank of England, which Law saw appear.

Bills of exchange dated from a previous bank of Barcelona, when the Jews were in disfavor and required to have their money in some liquid state. The Dutch gave the peninsular Jews an asylum, and hence fiscal science paused long at Amsterdam.

The Jewish race proved an exception to all the other migrations of Germans, Tartars, Phoenicians, etc., in that they carried financiers in their camp. The golden calf is still their passover mark. Their survival is not a miracle, but a scientific, a constitutional method, an insurance and commissariat. "Render unto Cæsar the things which are Cæsar's," was also spoken by a Jew.

At this day, when Rothschild and Belmont extend to us the certitude of our money and enable the times to revive, the traditions of some old transactions about Jerusalem are commonplace. From the Arab and Semitic sentimentality we get a foolish hostility to riches, and the church had to take among its saints the rich man who, by not giving his all to the poor, preserved the moralist a tomb.

A Dutchman, King William, reared among the semiJewish bankers of Holland, planted the bank of England at the suggestion of a merchant who offered through it to raise the king's war loans. The politicians in parliament attacked it. It charged the government 8 per cent, and £4,000 besides annually, but the people took the stock ten years after Penn founded Philadelphia.

The bank set Europe free from the French king and his persecutions and gave English liberty its career, of which we are a part, and the public debt of England is the private affair of the bank, not the business of impecunious political demagogues.

Why did America, with such a capable financier as Hamilton, grow up to dislike banks and bankers? The constant indebtedness of slaveholders and the debts of the free settlers to establish themselves on new land caused the two classes to unite against paying debts and taxes. The four presidents elected after Hamilton's retirement and death traduced his