The manufacture of cheese and butter has been among the earliest industries.  Away back in the history of the world, we find Adam and Eve conveying their milk from the garden of Eden, in a one-horse wagon to the cool spring cheese factory to be weighed in the balance.  Whatever may be said of Adam and Eve to their discredit in the marketing of the products of their orchard, it has never been charged that they stopped at the pump and put water in their milk cans.  Doubtless you will remember how Cain killed his brother Abel because Abel would not let him do the churning.  We can picture Cain and Abel driving mooly cows up to the house from the pasture in the southeast corner of the garden, and Adam standing at the bars with a tin pail and a three-legged stool, smoking a meerschaum pipe and singing “Hold the fort for I am coming through the rye,” while Eve sat on the verandah altering over her last year’s polonaise, and winking at the devil who stood behind the milk house singing, “I want to be an angel.”  After he got through milking he came up and saw Eve blushing, and he said, “Madame, cheese it,” and she chose it.

[Illustration:  A scene in paradise.]

But to come down to the present day, we find that cheese has become one of the most important branches of manufacture.  It is next in importance to the silver interest.  And, fellow cheese-mongers, you are doing yourselves great injustice that you do not petition congress to pass a bill to remonetize cheese.  There is more cheese raised in this country than there is silver, and it is more valuable.  Suppose you had not eaten a mouthful in thirty days, and you should have placed on the table before you ten dollars stamped out of silver bullion on one plate and nine dollars stamped from cheese bullion on another plate.  Which would you take first?  Though the face value of the nine cheese dollars would be ten per cent below the face value of ten silver dollars, you would take the cheese.  You could use it to better advantage in your business.  Hence I say cheese is more valuable than silver, and it should be made legal tender for all debts, public and private, except pew rent.  I may be in advance of other eminent financiers, who have studied the currency question, but I want to see the time come, and I trust the day is not far distant, when 412-1/2 grains of cheese will be equal to a dollar in codfish, and when the merry jingle of slices of cheese shall be heard in every pocket.

Then every cheese factory can make its own coin, money will be plenty, everybody will be happy, and there never will be any more war.  It may be asked how this currency can be redeemed?  I would have an incontrovertible bond, made of Limburger cheese, which is stronger and more durable.  When this is done you can tell the rich from the poor man by the smell of his money.  Now-a-days many of us do not even get a smell of money, but in the good days which are coming the gentle zephyr will waft to us the able-bodied Limburger, and we shall know that money is plenty.