exchanges, payment of wages and settlement of bills, for fifty cents; but the banks sell the Mexicans twenty-one of them for ten gold dollars—­an American eagle!  So far as the native people go, labor and produce are counted in silver, and the purchaser, or employer gets as much for a silver dollar as for a gold dollar.  The native will take ten dollars in gold for ten dollars only in all settlements of accounts, and would just as willingly—­even more so, accept ten Mexican dollars as ten American dollars in gold coin.  Salaries are paid and goods delivered according to the silver standard.  Of course, in due time this state of things will pass away, if we hold to the gold standard, but as the case stands the soldiers and sailors of our army and fleet, paid under the home standard, receive double pay, and get double value received for clothing, tobacco and whatever they find they want—­indeed, for the necessaries and luxuries of life.  The double standard in this shape is not distasteful to the boys.

We have both theories and conditions confronting us in these aspects of the silver and labor questions.  The Oriental people are obdurate in their partiality for silver.  It is the cheaper labor that adheres to the silver standard, partially, it is held, because silver is the more convenient money for the payment of small sums.  But labor cannot be expected, at its own expense, to sustain silver for the profit of capital, or rather of the middle man between labor and capital.  Labor, so far as it is in politics in this country, should not, without most careful study and deliberation, conclude that its force in public affairs would be abated, and its policy of advancing wages antagonized by the absorption of the Philippines in our country.  On the contrary, the statesmanship that is representative of labor may discover that it is a great fact, one of the greatest of facts, that the various countries and continents of the globe are being from year to year more and more closely associated, and that to those intelligently interested, without regard to the application of their views of justice or expediency, in the labor and silver questions—­the convictions, the fanaticisms, of the vast silver nations—­and enormous multitudes of the people of Asia, touching the silver standard—­and the possible progress of labor, as a guiding as well as plodding ability increases incessantly in interest, and must grow in inheritance.  As the conditions of progressive civilization are developed our interests cannot be wholly dissevered from those of the Asiatics.  We would be unwise to contemplate the situation of to-day as one that can or should perpetuate itself.  Suppose we accept, the governing responsibility in the Philippines.  It is not beyond the range of reasonable conjecture that American labor can educate the laborers of the Philippines out of their state of servitude as cheap laborers, and lead them to co-operate rather than compete with us, and not to go into the