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Show M A Glittering Generality H a CURRENT magazine has a portrait ana a H jh$ highly eulogistic notice of Professor James H Laurence Laughlin, who is at the head of H the department of political economy in the Uni- H versity of Chicago, who was recently summoned H as a government expert on the tariff, and who has H now gone as a representative of the University D of Chicago to the Pan-American scientific con- K gress at Santiago, Chili. This eulogistic notice HBj of him tells how eminent he was in the advocacy HI of the gold standard in the old days before silver H was demonetized; in feet, how he spoke at the. H meeting in New York in February in 1891, to H which meeting Grover Cleveland sent his famous H letter against the free coinage of silver. f Wm Wo have no doubt but what Mr. Laughlin is a H finished scholar, but our idea of him is that he ought to occupy some other chair in the University Univer-sity of Chicago rather than that of political economy, econ-omy, because he had hardly gotten out of college until he tried to prove that all the old records of political economy that dealt with the science of money were in the wrong. He saw half the money of this country converted into a commodity, commod-ity, and because of that he saw two-thirds of the men of this country who were in small business, or on farms, and who, by their little capital and their work, were trying ti make a living, made bankrupt. It did not change his mind in the least; he, had a hobby and he rode It. He Is riding rid-ing it still. He and his kind triumphed, silver was demonetized, de-monetized, but he has now to watch while 800,-000,000 800,-000,000 ppople in the world, or half the people, will not accept his gold standard, cannot accept it, and because they cannot, it makes it impossible for the United States to export the goods that those countries need, and It makes it easier foi those countries to export their products to our country, because through the depreciation of silver sil-ver they can supply those products at half what they could have done thirty years ago. Professor Laughlin covers the case referred to in the Bible of those who "have knowledge without with-out wisdom." We presume there is no discount on his scholarship, but we presume likewise that ho does not know any more how a poor man goes to work to make a living, a poor and unlettered man, than Nicodemus knew about the second birth. It is all right enough for him to represent a great university in the Pan-American congress and discuss glittering generalities with the people peo-ple of South America, but if he had some strong, common sense, and would look around, he would see that because of the difference between their money and ours we are losing trade and prestige every day, and that when he used his influence to destroy half the real money of this country he used his influence to turn back Its civilization and the civilization of all the world. Again, we suspect his real knowledge of the tariff and its effects is just as superficial as is his knowledge of the potency of money and the effect ef-fect of increasing or decreasing Its volume in the world. He can have no knowledge of the tariff except theoretical knowledge; how it affects the industries in the new states of the union, he can know nothing. In the presence of the industries of the country he is but a dress parade colonel, good for Fourth of July, but who "never set a squadron in the field nor the division of a battle knows:" the battle through which the poor man and the unlettered man fight for a living. |