Page:A History of Banking in the United States.djvu/495

 but a very subordinate share in it, and are not to blame for any part of it. Eight or nine hundred millions of paper rest on a specie reserve which was originally planned for three hundred and forty-six millions, and that upon a fallacious plan. The stability of this currency has been maintained for two years by arbitrary purchases of gold, involving a manipulation of the foreign exchanges. Such manipulation may be excusable under great stress of other dangers, but it is perilous to some of the greatest and most delicate interests of the country. Theoreticial and practical financiers must agree that this manipulation is a subject of grave apprehension, all the more because it is beyond the power of any man to foreesee or estimate the consequences in their remoter reactions and more extended complications. The operation only wins time. It is no remedy. When the respite expires, if no sound measures have been adopted, the problem is still there, greater and more oppressive than ever, and complicated with the consequences of arbitrary interference with one of the most important and most delicate parts of the financial system. In the meantime, the factions produced by various dogmas about the currency, by interests engaged in it, and by party intrigues to profit by it, have grown fierce and stubborn. They exhaust their strength in making a deadlock. We are in a financial crisis which is becoming chronic, and which will be solved by a great disaster, unless we can rally knowledge and statesmanship to deal with it.