To Summarize Briefly, My Contention Is—

(1.) That a condition essential to the currency of any country is that it must be of such a character, that by regulation, its total numerary volume may be adequate to the business requirements of the community.

(2.) That a so-called metallic basis for a currency is a delusion and a snare, and only plays into the hands of those who seek to avail themselves unduly of the results of other people's labor.

(3.) That for the social and political welfare of any country it is indispensable that the emission of its circulating medium, money, must be in the hands of one party only, and that party must be the State.

(4.) That as the power of capital, at present, is the only efficient bond of co-operation there must be substituted for it the united force of organised labor, and of a State Bank of Issue, before any permanent change for the better is possible.

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(5.) That while this change is being effected, the increase of knowledge in social science afforded by the correlated facts of statistics will hasten on, I hope peacefully, the revolution that I have tried to briefly set forth in this paper.

It will be doubtless be conceded that the true province of science is to utilize the lessons afforded by the study of the past, whether in time nearer or more remote, till at length "all things shall work together for good" because the finite and fallible science of man shall more nearly run co-ordinate with the infinite and not fallible purpose of the Supreme Mind. This result cannot be while civilization and science leave out of their calculations "the least of these" who bear the human form. If I am correctly informed, even the Maories surpass ourselves in caring for every individual in their community. As I think, it is time that money, the means of the distribution of wealth, should be made to more efficiently perform the office that pertains to it, viz., that "he that gathered much had nothing over, while he that gathered little had no lack." Political and social science may be considered as the object and end of all discovery. "Gather up the fragments that nothing be lost" surely applies not less to humanity and to each of its units than to objects whose main title to our consideration is that they minister to man's sustentation and well-being. As noticed in the address of Sir James Hector, the distinguished President of the Association last evening, science should teach how, in prospect of a vastly increasing population upon these islands, the elements for their support should not be deported without practical science providing for a renewed supply of plant-food to the soil. It is to be hoped that no considerable portion of the surface of beautiful and picturesque New Zealand shall be rendered useless for all time by mining operations, like vast tracks in Nubia, California, and elsewhere—when the disinherited classes shall become the special wards of science—and when the civilization of the future may boast as did the Incas of Peru in a past age, that not a single person of all their subjects was not provided for.

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