The Portland daily press., 1893-06-27

n EN the panic of 1857,
:az@YRD which happened
when l was a schoolboy of sixteen.
All remember about that panic was
small pocket money, and seeing fine
looking old ex-merchants getting
drunk. In 1889 l went to Nantes, in
France, where one of those broken
merchants of 1857 was our consul He
had been silk merchant and after
ward a silk buyer for Claf1in and other
houses, but he was a southerner by
birth, from South Carolina, and not
adapted to surmount panics, so that
the old man was consul among a peo-
pie he did not like, at a salary of only
about one thousand dollars a year.
While visiting him one morning, Mrs.
Pauncefote, wife of the British consul
at Nantes, and sister-in-law of Ambas-
sador Julian Pauncefote, came into the
American consul's. The Briton was
getting some nine thousand dollars a
year salary, having been retired from
the Indian service, while our poor man
had to have his daughters, who were
well reared, market and prepare his
food. He showed me in the streets Of
Nantes a car which ran by compressed
air, the only one at that time in the
world, I suppose, and he wanted to
market the right for it in America.
had hardly left there before the old
man and his wife died, within three
days of each other, and were brought
home to the United States in the same
ship.
The panic of 1857 started in the west,
and was a general panic, the result of
overtrading and extensions Think of
it now! At that time Minnesota, Iowa.
and Oregon were just coming into the
Union. Yet there was enough country
east of Chicago to carry on right good
panic. We were assisted out of that
panic by the productive gold mines OF
the Rocky mountains and California.
wonder if the government could
not put a bounty on the finding of gold
at the present time. If we were to
strike about one hundred million dol
lars of gold per annum, which is hardly
more than that produced following the
panic of 1857, we would be inreceipt OF
some eight millions of new gold every
month.
Machinery, among its other injuries,
has discouraged the production of gold
and promoted that of silver. We got
to washing down gravel banks in Cali.
fornia, which are full of gold, with ny
draulic hoses, and the gravel overran
the valleys and produced foundations,
SO that the farmers began to howl, and
they came to congress and stopped by
draulic washing. These big hoses and
MOBILES were in the light of trusts, and
substitutes for many a little dish where
gold was washed out by hand. At the
same time stamp mills began to be
built, which mashed quartz and multi
piled silver and made it cheap John
Sherman said to me near year ago
that he was in favor of stopping the
purchase of silver bullion, because the
cost producing it was much less than
an equivalent for it's inherent value In
many respects the tendency of labor
saving machinery has been to make
production spasmodic, ELUSIVE and I'M
certain, to make the labor unreliable,
dAd w pun OuO VI CAlStO1SC olI6U UOlQ
peasantry which, once destroyed, can
never be supplied. Universal labor
saving machinery is an extravaganza
upon the producer, and dispossesses
that steady hand labor which finally
comes to have principle and an abid.
ing place. At Potsdam, where the en-
peror of Germany lives, came upon
men and women in the field who had
just been cleaning grain, and they
the sixteenth century.
America labors under some disad-
vantages which make it in hard times
a very difficult country to recuperate.
For instance, the female sex in this
country does not divide the labors and
burdens of life with the male SEX It
is true that in the streets and manu-
featuring towns we see good many
women going to labor. But the aver
age plain American family is sup
ported wholly by the man. When his
hand is cut off nobody knows how tc
turn about. In France the women
keep the shops. In Germany the
women do the work. These replenish.
ing channels make it possible il
America to-day for the comfortable
houses to be kept. In moving up the
grade of American life the woman has
become an ornament and not a sup
port. Hence the equanimity with
which divorces are sought. In other
countries there may be occasion fol-
divorce, but forget and forgive is a
cheaper motto than swelling some law
yer's fat income out of the family fry
ing.
One day in Washington, in 1878, was
in the treasury department., when word
came in that the shutters had been put
up on Jay Cookies banking house and
a crowd had gathered around it. The
comptroller of the currency, Mr. Knox,
afterward president of one of the New