The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1868-12-11
The Currency Question.

From the Chicago Repu6. .icdn
We are glad that the session of the so-called
National Board of Trade has been held at this
juncture at Cincinnati, and there would have
resulted one advantage to the public in giving
its loose discussions much more wide
dissemination and publication even than
the liberal space accorded them by the press.
And this, not because they reached
anything, and did anythin but be-
cause they made about the same progress as
o horse that should take half-a-dozen turns
round bark mill. And this is timely in its
suggestiveness just now when Congress is
coming in session. 1t should tend to create
among the people more patience with their
representatives, and better temper at the
delays that must be borne before we worry
through to any solution of our currency
perplexities. We venture the opinion
that every one of the fluent and ready
speakers at Cincinnati has been fond of
calling himself practical business man,
and by inference and by direct assertion giving
the people abundant sympathies that the
number of practical business men has been
so lightly drawn upon for our national law
makers. We could settle this whole subject
with Congress made up of business men,
has been said so many times, in all parts of
the country, that it is instructive, if not en-
tirely satisfactory, to discover how lily these
gentlemen agree when their views come to be
compared in public gathering of their own
class. And this is not q reflection on their
general sagacity or their thorough earnest
ness II is simply saying that they squabbled
like bevy of new and old school physicians
over a doubtful case in therapeutics, bella
bored one another with their pill machines
and clyster-pumps, and left the sick man
Just where he was. What reason is there
to believe that the same diversity of views
and the same inconclusive results would
not have followed, if all this had been
matter for the Congressional Globe to print
at Government expense? We doubt whether
any policy upon which twenty of the most
solid and successful fnanciers of the
country could agree, as q solution of our
currency difficulties, would not be laboriously
cOnfuted by like number of equally solid
and successful fnanciers; and the chances are
that the attacking party would be quadrupled,
go much easier is it to pull down than to build
up. BY this we do not mean that currency
discussion can do no good, in or out Of Con-
gress, but to bring up the fresh proof of the
wide diversity of views prevailing on the
whole subject, and how likely it is that any
cure can be speedy when a decision is so
| difficult as to what cure is needed. There are
several of our brethren Of the press who can
safely take the moral home to themselves.
| By all means let them 60 on with their
| learned and proliX luoubrations, but let them
| not get ill-te tempered at pOstponement of their
adoption as national policy, since we can see
that what is a middle with Congress is equally
SO with the National Board of Trade, and with
editors learned in fnance-thess opinions re-
semblipg the zebra's stripes in the Snowman &
! advertisement-''no two alike"