The cur

after, the price in greenbacks of lands, houses, rents, groceries, nearly all the dry goods, etc., remained quietly the same. rency, therefore, was not depreciated, but gold was, through the agency of coin and stock gambling, at a premium. So was gunpowder and labor; so were cannons and cannon-balls; and these were real premiums produced by the stern demands of war.

If that sort of argumentation held good, that our currency depreciated during the war, because Wall Street speculation, of the wildest, most unsubstantial kind, sent the price of gold up to two hundred and seventy-five per cent premium for a short time, what must we say of the depreciation which gold suffered in England during the same period; since the price of cotton rose in that country, from 1860 to 1864, full four hundred per cent. As against cotton, the gold money of Great Britain had, therefore, depreciated considerably more than our legal-tender money had depreciated as against gold in Wall Street, with all the stock and coin gamblers to support it. And, what is more, the legal-tender depreciation here was merely a speculative affair, while the gold depreciation as against cotton in Great Britain was a grim reality, for awhile spreading fearful ruin over the manufacturing districts. The demand for cotton and gold in the respective localities regulated the price of each commodity, according to the laws of trade.

But I go further, and deny Mr. Patterson's assumption, that under a well-regulated national-money system, like mine, the government would settle its payments in its own notes, and thus force "any amount of paper money into circulation." Its yearly payments would be settled by its yearly revenues, which by close calculation can always be made large enough to meet every contingency. Should there be a deficiency, however, I don't see why it would be more improper to supply it by an issue of treasury-notes than by an issue of bonds, as governments are now in the habit of doing. I am fully convinced, however, that a well-regulated system of annual statistics, and a carefully prepared report made by a board of commissioners, based upon those statistics, and stating the amount of additional money, if any, needed by the country, would render any extra issues unnecessary, except in the case of another war.

PUBLIC HIGHWAYS.

CHAPTER I.

THE NATURE OF HIGHWAYS.

The State guarantees to each citizen full protection in the harmonious and fit enjoyment of all the faculties of his mind and body. In order to be able to make good this guarantee, the State must be able to have access to all citizens, and they with each other and with the State. The right of the State to have such access constitutes its right and duty to lay out public highways and regulate the intercourse thereby established between its citizens. The State must, moreover, have the right of the speediest access to its citizens, for how could the State guarantee protection to each citizen if other citizens had speedier access to him? If the State had control only over common roads, while criminally aggressive citizens had control over railways, where would be the sovereign power?

Furthermore, since in a well-regulated State each citizen has his specific vocation, and thus is dependent upon being able to have transmitted to him the productions of all other vocations which he stands in need of, the State must be in a position to govern all such transmission, and hence must have full control over all means of transmission or communication, of which there are at present three: those of postal, those of telegraphic, and those of commercial intercommunication. For in no other way could the State guarantee to each citizen his right to all the products of others which are purchasable, and which he, by his labors in his vocation, is able to purchase.

CHAPTER II.

THE MAIL AND THE TELEGRAPH.

For some inscrutable reason, the State has hitherto conceived it to be the duty of government to take control of only one species of intercommunication: that of letters. For this reason, government has established a post-office department, by means of which all its citizens are guaranteed the right of correspondence by written letter. At the same time, this department has selected chiefly one species of merchandise for governmental transmission: that of printed matter, though only to a limited extent. It is hard to say why, with the invention of the telegraph as a quicker mode of communication than that by letter, government did not at once take control of it. The same principle underlies the telegraph as the mail: that it is the duty of the State to secure to each citizen sure communication with every other citizen in the quickest possible manner. To leave this matter to private corporations is unsafe, and leads to the establishment of monopolies, that are a constant oppression of the people and a permanent danger to the State itself.

In a well-organized government, therefore, the State itself will take possession of all lines of telegraph, and operate them exclusively for the benefit of the people; and submarine lines of telegraph connecting foreign States across oceans, gulfs, lakes, and bays should be put under the control of the two States thus connected, so that neither the people nor the government of those States may be dependent upon, and at the mercy of private monopolies.

It is no easy task to make men realize the danger threatening from such an extraordinary monopoly as the telegraph system has grown to be in our country. Sure of the permanence of our republican institutions, we allow these agencies of tyranny to grow up without check or hinderance, and to increase their power by consuming the lesser attempts at rivalry and competition in the simplest manner,— that is to say, by buying them out. All European States, one after another, have found it necessary to take control of the telegraph, and in every case the result has been of the greatest advantage and profit to the people. Great Britain was the last one to take the control of

the telegraph from private monopolies and exercise it solely for the advantage of the State at large; and while under corporate.management the telegraphic communications had increased only from six millions in 1860 to eight millions in 1868, which is an average annual increase of only fifteen per cent, under the management of the government the business steadily increased at an annual average of thirtythree per cent. This extraordinary result was mainly due to the fact that when the British government took charge of all the telegraph lines, in 1870, it at once lowered the rates one-third.

Private corporations are always very slow in reducing rates. If the mail business had been put into the hands of private express companies, the postal charges would still be at rates now long since abolished. But the government, being interested in no dividend account, and making its calculations only on the basis of accommodating the greatest number of people, without any other expense than the mere accommodation costs, acts on an entirely different principle, and accordingly invites additional business by lowering rates. We all know what an immense increase of letter-writing followed the introduction of the present low rates of postage. Were government to take hold of the telegraph lines and reduce the rates as Great Britain has done, or Belgium, the business of the telegraph would doubtless quadruple in the course of two or three years. As it is, our rates of telegraphing are twice as high as the rates are in England, and three times as high as rates in Belgium; and the result has been, that while the increase in the number of messages sent in Great Britain since 1870 has been an average of thirty-three per cent per annum, the increase in our country has been only sixteen per cent. The people have a right to the speediest and cheapest mode of intercommunication with each other, and it is the duty of the government to furnish it, and guarantee its accuracy and certainty.

Still, it is not alone in this respect that the telegraph business needs the control of the government. It not only hinders intercommunication under private management, but it has become one of the monopolies that virtually rule the country with despotic sway. Its growth into this power is a curious one, though the same phenomenon has been witnessed in every other country that first allowed private corporations to undertake enterprises that were peculiarly within the right and duty of the State to establish.

No sooner did the first telegraph between Washington and New York prove a success, than all over the country occurred a general pole-raising and wire-stretching, wholly regardless of the immediate prospects of sufficient earnings to maintain the lines. In our usual style, we discounted the future most liberally, organized small companies in the various villages of the land, and looked on composedly as one after the other broke up, the larger ones feeding on the smaller awhile, then themselves swallowed by the still larger ones, until only two were left to devour each other, the Western Union, with the main business of the country from New York to San Francisco and over all the Northern States, and the American Telegraph Company, having lines in some Southern States and along the sea-coast. About the year 1858 the Western Union had reached the position of telegraphic supremacy, and began its career of glory, power, and dominion.

Its capital was then $385,700. During the following eight years it declared, upon this insignificant capital-stock, dividends to the amount of $17,810,460, which, with the issue of some stock for other purposes, raised its capital in 1866 to $22,013,700. In other words, on its capital of $385,700 it paid during these years an annual average cash and stock dividend of $2,745.922.

With this enormous profit of eight years, it was now in a fair condition to swallow its only great rival, the American Telegraph Company, which had a capital of $3,833,100. This it paid them, and a bonus of $8,000,000 of stock in the Western Union as a dividend.

Then another small company, that had sprung up as a sort of blackmail competition with the Western Union, and which had constructed a few thousand miles of almost worthless lines, had to be put out of the way. The Western Union paid $7,216,300 for these lines, and thus became then the exclusive telegraph company in the United States, having raised its capital from $385,700 in 1858 to $41,060,100 in 1870, on all of which watered-stock capital the people, who are compelled to use the wires, have to pay interest at the high rates asked for the transmission of messages.

Since 1870 the telegraph business of the United States has increased fully one-half more, as will appear from the following tables:

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