Birmingham age-herald., 1895-04-28
BANKERS POINT OF VIEW,
AS SET FORTH BY ONE OF THEIR NUMBER
What Has He to Do With Legislation2-How and When Should He Exert
 His Influence?

Chicago, April 27-William G. Cornwell of Buffalo. president of the New York State Bankers association, delivered the principal address at the bankers club monthly dinner at Kinsleys tonight He spoke on What Ought Bankers to Do About Legislation?" In substance he spoke as follows:
 "There was a time not many years ago when the banker was content to keep still and under the ban of curses of ob- jurgations to pursue his quiet course. Tine silence of the banker on the impor- tant questions of the day, for the solution of which the public looked to him, has been one of the most potent reasons for the present unsatisfactory condition of our national finances, and the existence of our currency troubles. If in 1S75-6-7-S the bankers had been organized as they are organized now the greenbaek would long ago have been wiped out, the silver lunacy before it had wrought in calculable damage would have been confined to the asylums, where it belongs, and populism would have promptly been swept back into the holes of it's native prairie.
 What ought bankers to do about legis- lation? This question Supercedes all questions of internal management and money making. 1 do not believe that any but the most superficial demagogue will deny that trouble al the base is a trou- ble of currency. What is wrong with currency? In a few words, the redemp- tion of our entire volume of paper money falls upon the treaSury-a thousand mil lions of dollars depending for redemp- tion in geld upon an institution which has no means of getting gold in a legit- innate way to redeem with, which has none of the machinery necessary for car rying on the note-issuing business, no automatic way for getting information as to how much money is needed In trade no possible way of getting that money out when needed and no way of getting it back if by clumsy chance some gets out
 "On this silver question the people are beginning to discard the old deusion that law can regulate the value of coin or of anything else; that law covered with some vague power can decree that twice one are one, whether 1t be standard metals, base balls or grains of wheat They have asked themselves what must be the standard of value and they have brought out this question: What would we rather have than anything elseY Put the question to a thousand average people and they will answer money. Ask them what kind of money and they will tell you gold. Why gold? Why not silver? Because silver is in dispute. Sil- yer is in doubt. There is no doubt about gold. Gold is the best. Do you think you can change that opinion by law will an act of congress do it? Will the combined efforts of all the nations on earth do it? And yet that is what the in ternational bimetallists propose to do These men. it seems to ne, are assuming the functions of the Almighty.
 "It is the bankers duty to use the large influence which is at his command and make his client face the issue at stake. The bankers should organize sound money clubs in every community ana carry on the ducation by pamphlet and sneech Once created. the clubs could unite under a central head, similar to the one just formed in Germany. "A union for the defense of the gold standard, admitting representatives from all the leading chambers of commerce. This action would soon n ake itself felt in the political tide and warn the politician that the sentiment for the great intelH- gent majority is for sound money.
 ''These are the things the banker should accomplish and no one could more widely disseminate sound doctrine than he. new sntiment would blaze from one end of the land to the other; a sentiment which once esta blished would mean quick execution in the right direction and SattS- factory settlement of the current queS- tion in the United States for all time. And the sentiment which would be thus crystalized by the organized work or the bankers, and the fact which would be demonstrated, and which is true today, that the party which panders to free silver or which, with a reputation for being sound party, endeavors to take the middle course on the money question between sound and unSound money, Is doomed, and dserves to be. And this other: The politician, high or low, who today turns from the straight course of sound money and the gold standard stabs dead once for all his every chance for political success, especially if he wants to be president"