Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 10.djvu/205

 BLAND

When you do that, will not the silver-using people come to our shores to make their purchases rather than go to the European powers, where they demand a ratio of 22 to 25? There can be no doubt of the answer to that question.

Many now born, by the time they are voters will compose part of a nation containing perhaps one hundred and twenty-five millions of people, with unsurpassed energies, with a genius nowhere equaled, and with a vast territory upon which those energies and that genius can operate. But a short time ago when you looked across the Alleghany Mountains you beheld the Western wilderness roamed only by the savage and wild beast. To-day it is teeming with its millions of civilized people, and when you cross the Mississippi you just begin to enter the great domain of this country of ours, for more than two-thirds of it lies beyond the Father of Waters.

And, Mr. Speaker, it is that two-thirds of our territory, rich as it is in gold and silver, embedded together in the same deposits, in the same mountains, so that you can not extract the one without extracting the other, — it is that portion of our territory that would give us the money that we need, the money of the world, good money, hard money. Democratic money; a country that the civilized world must look to for its future monetary supply if it is to continue on what is called the hard-money basis. And yet we are to-day asked to do what? To lay the blighting hand of confiscation upon the