Diversified Labor.

As none can supply all his wants, taste, ability, and circumstances have diversified labor, so that whoever works with hand or brain must interchange his products with others. It is this high activity of diversified labor that creates prosperity.

Something, however, intervenes to prevent the free interchange of diversified labor, and that "something" is the unjust laws, governing money and its many substitutes. An unemployed shoemaker would willingly make shoes for the shoeless children of the weaver; and the weaver would gladly weave cloth for the ragged offspring of the shoemaker, but these imperious money laws say to both, and to all other producers, "You shall periodically remain idle, though your children shiver or starve."

Barter answered well enough the few wants of barbarism, but civilization energizes the faculties, and a larger volume of money becomes more and more an essential medium of exchange. The increasing productiveness of machinery can only be absorbed by the large profits of labor when stimulated by a freer supply of money and consequent reduction of interest.

Money, either in coin or paper, stamped by law, and backed by the whole wealth of the nation, by common consent is the acknowledged best exchange for labor. In Chili, at one time, pieces of stamped leather, largely issued by a citizen of acknowledged responsibility, successfully supplied the place of "reals." However well any individual or corporate representative may for a time supply a money deficiency, experience points to an interchangeable national currency, interconvertible with national bonds, at low interest, as the safest refuge of industry in the uncertain struggles of the nations for gold.

As the fullest activity of diversified labor is the most important of all national questions, and as its free interchange is governed by the volume of money, labor may rightfully demand a sufficiency for its exchanges. It is not so important that a few should enjoy excessive interest from its scarcity, as that the whole people shall have their faculties quickened into fullest life by its sufficiency.