through the air a thing I had long dreamed of doing — may be interesting to you as being written by one to whom they are extremely novel; and at the risk of writing much which I know will appear to my readers as a matter of course, I have deemed it best (and Professor Harding supports me in this decision) to tell everything just as it happened in its regular order.

One thing only I beg of you, gentle reader, and that is, that you will remember that this little book is written in the hope that from it we may be able to learn something, even if it is but little, which will help increase our scanty stock of knowledge. It may be that the people of the twenty second century have nothing to learn from such an uncivilized fellow as I am, yet I cannot but think that the contrast between the nineteenth and the twenty-second century methods of thought is instructive to all, and this is my excuse for writing; therefore, on with my story-the story of the twenty-second century.

CHAPTER II.

WHEREIN I LEARN OF THE BIRTH OF THE

MONEY REPUBLIC.

Seated one evening in the library after dinner, I broached the subject of change of opinion regarding economical questions, in order to draw out the professor and gain for myself a more thorough knowledge of present views.

"Your system seems so well to have solved the problem which confronted humanity," I said, "that I cannot understand it. Now, in my time we considered the social system so complex that we generally laughed at the man who said he could remedy it by changing one factor. I had often heard it stated that although many men had thought deeply on the subject of economics, they could not come to any conclusion which fitted and explained all the facts."

"Yes?" said the professor. "Well, you know that all students of economics in your

time were not deep thinkers. In my library I have the economic books of your century, and they lead me to believe that the depth to which your professors went in this subject was dependent on the politics of the capital which furnished their salaries."

"Well, well, professor," said I, laughing, "I do not know but you are right."

"Towards the last of the nineteenth century the changes in the coinage of the various nations of the world caused a great deal of attention to be devoted to this subject, and it was this fact which led to a radical change in society. You remember probably that the question was between bimetallism and monometallism. There were in the United States some men who, in studying up this question, were convinced that society existed upon an unjust basis, and they believed that that unjust basis was the current theory of finance. You will, of course, remember that your circulating medium consisted primarily of gold and a certain amount of credit money based on this gold and redeemed with this gold. Now it is evident, said these thinkers, that this is entirely wrong and unjust; for no matter how well a certain amount of circulating medium may handle trade at one time,

if trade increases, the amount of medium must increase, or else it cannot handle the increased trade."

- Hoid on, do not go so fast. These things are so new to me that it takes time for me to fully comprehend them."

"Well," said the professor, "what shall I explain? You surely understand that money is simply a medium of exchange."

Why, no; it has a double function. It is also a measure of values."

"There you are in error," said the professor. "No commodity or substance can justly be a measure or standard of values."

"Why, I do not understand," said I. "How can you measure values except by comparing the purchasing power of one substance with that of another which is accepted as a true and never changing standard? And when we read in the market reports of a fall in price in any substance, how do we know what it means unless we accept some standard commodity like gold?"

"Let me illustrate the foolishness of your last statement by a simple example. Suppose there is in a room a thermometer, and that you, a slave, are required to keep the temperature up to 100°, we will say, by working at a

furnace. Every now and then you run to the thermometer to watch the temperature, which keeps mysteriously falling. You cannot understand it. You work harder and harder, but the temperature keeps going down, and you are at a loss to comprehend it, until it dawns upon you that your master, by his manipulations outside of the room, is raising the scale by which the temperature is measured, for the satisfaction of making you work. This is especially applicable to your times, if we remember that the man who manipulates the scale is the capitalist, that is, the man who deals in money. His object in manipulating the scale is this: in general he is a creditor, and it is important to him that the debtor be kept in debt as long as possible, for the longer the debt lasts, the more interest the creditor gets. So he will raise the scale gradually, and when the temperature climbs up to it, up goes the scale again; so that the poor debtor, although he has paid the debt three and four times over actually, yet, measured by the scale, the debt is never paid. So you can see that, unless the creditor is willing, the debtor can never pay the debt. If the latter should suggest that perhaps the creditor has raised the scale, there would be