that there is several billion times as much gold in the water as has been extracted from the land up to date. Now, if this gold can be taken from the water, as is claimed, at the rate of a dollar's worth for a cent, soon it will be scarcely worth its weight in good rag-paper. The much defamed "rag baby" will be a very aristocratic personage beside it. In that case what will become of "the metal appointed by God in his goodness to serve as the currency of the world"? Would it be possible to more thoroughly revolutionize political economy than by dethroning gold? And could gold be more effectually dethroned than by reducing its value to insignificance? Its monetary privilege would disappear instantly and of necessity, and the era of free money would dawn, with all the tremendous blessings, physical, mental, and moral, that must follow in its wake. As Proudhon well says: "The demonetization of gold, the last idol of the Absolute, will be the greatest act of the revolution of the future."
All hail, then, Electricity! On with your magnificent work! Lend a hand, you believers in dynamite; we offer you a better saviour! This good fairy is carrying on a "propaganda by deed" that discounts all your Ravachols. Success to her! May she force gold, the last bulwark of Archism, to become, through offering itself for sacrifice on the altar of Liberty, the greatest of Anarchists, the final emancipator of the race!
Money, said Adam Smith, in one of those flashes of his intellectual genius which have so illuminated man's economic path, money is "a wagon-way through the air." If Electricity shall make of this wagon-way a railway, it will be the most signal, the most useful of her exploits.
ECONOMIC SUPERSTITION.
[Liberty, August 13, 1892]
Apropos of my editorial of a few weeks ago, forecasting the probable increase in the supply of gold through its extraction from the ocean and the consequences thereof. Comrade Koopman writes me: "If this is so, every craft that sails the ocean blue will carry an electrical centre-board to rake in the gold as it sails along. I am afraid, though, that the governments will betake themselves to platinum (I believe Russia tried it once) or some other figment, and so postpone their day of reckoning. But what a shaking-up a gold deluge will give
