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Show TOM REED. V j It waa great loss to the United Statea that Thomas B. Reed waa ent off in the prima of hia life. Ilad he lived twenty years longer it ia very doubt-ful doubt-ful whether any man who ever lived in the United Statea would have held higher reputation, and only a few like Daniel Webster and Thomas Marshall Mar-shall and a very few others would have been rated half aa great. In the old stormy days when he waa trying to make the house of representatives a working work-ing body, he said one time of the opposition, "It presents the dead level of a Dutch landscape with all ita windmills, but without a trace of the beauty and fertility." . . And at another time of hia own minority he said,. "They behaved with gentleness and modesty. I partly because they were very good men and partly , because there were very few of them." Another time he aaid, "It took four thousand . yeara of paganism and fifteen centuries of Chris-. Chris-. tianity.to produce a two-prong fork, and another century to bring it into use." On another occasion he said, "The white man with hia yellow money cannot compete with the yellow man with his white money." The full significance sig-nificance of that remark grows more and more apparent ap-parent every day. The yellow man haa continued to Use hia white money. Through it he has abut out, the exports of the United Statea from his porta, and he ia able now, just when we thought that hia competition had ceased, to be a menace, to lay his products down in our porta at a discount of 60 per cent over thirty yeara ag6 when measured in our money. This ia not due, however, to the yellow man's shrewdness, but to the stupidity of the white race who twenty-flve years ago had a majority majori-ty in congress and a majority of the. great newspapers news-papers of the east. -They thought it waa very wise on their part to tell the people of thia country that the money must always be sound, never tainted, aud they plnng to that until they got the money that way. They had forgotten that in the most critical time in the life of our nation they had no money except irredeemable paper money, bnt that we prospered more than we ever had before, and now they realixe if they atop to think, which' we very much floubt, that with a sound money, or with what they called sound money, the most of it is tied up in banks and depositories and the people peo-ple would be doing a great deal bettor, getting rich a great deal faster, meeting the demands of the a Re muen more xuiiy u iney naa let tne money which they called unsound money alone and kept in harmony with such countries aa' the orient on (he vrcst and sueh countries aa France and Italy and Spain and all western Asia on the east, and Spanish Span-ish America on the south. If, instead of Tom Reed dying about twenty repreaentativea of tha national banks of New York, Philadelphia, Boston and.Cbi-cago and.Cbi-cago had died in hia stead, it might have been a little rough on them, but it would have been better for the country, for Tom Reed in hia own person emphasized the fact that men are nothing, a man j U everything. |