It is the cheaper labor that adheres to the silver standard, partially, it is held, because silver is the more convenient money for the payment of small sums.

But labor cannot be expected, at its own expense, to sustain silver for the profit of capital, or rather of the middle man between labor and capital.

Labor, so far as it is in politics in this country, should not, without most careful study and deliberation, conclude that its force in public affairs would be abated, and its policy of advancing wages antagonized by the absorption of the Philippines in our country.

On the contrary, the statesmanship that is representative of labor may discover that it is a great fact, one of the greatest of facts, that the various countries and continents of the globe are being from year to year more and more closely associated, and that to those intelligently interested, without regard to the application of their views of justice or expediency, in the labor and silver questions--the convictions, the fanaticisms, of the vast silver nations--and enormous multitudes of the people of Asia, touching the silver standard--and the possible progress of labor, as a guiding as well as plodding ability increases incessantly in interest, and must grow in inheritance.

As the conditions of progressive civilization are developed our interests cannot be wholly dissevered from those of the Asiatics.