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SILVER question, MONETARY policy, GOLD coins, INTERNATIONAL relations, CONSTITUTIONS, EQUALITY, CIVIL rights, and ECONOMIC policy

In this article, the author examines the implications of the Silver Question before the U.S. Congress of 1886 to the history of monetary policy in the U.S. The Sections of the Act of February 28, 1878, calling a Monetary Conference, made the U.S. the champion and advocate in the community of nations of the restoration of civil order in dealing with money. Concurrent regulation of metallic money by a competent majority of nations, and on the basis of equality of legal right between the two metals, became by this Act a fixed object of the foreign policy. As for the time consumed and to be consumed in passing from this turning point of history to the success of the policy, it is well to mark that it is not uncommon for men to wait a long time for the attainment of a great end. The United Colonies suffered under the Confederation for many years before they adopted the Constitution. The restoration of greenbacks to par with gold was a struggle of many years. The diplomatic successes of this country have usually required a long time for their attainment; and in the rare instances when Americans had a foreign policy in the specific sense, when there was some important object to be gained through the action of several foreign powers, the lack of a continuing, organized, high-grade civil service has naturally unfitted Americans from advancing a meritorious cause with the maximum of speed.

MONEY, LEGAL tender, FINANCE, and BANK notes

Examines the clauses of the Constitution relating to money. Description of the specifications of the power which is given to the Congress of the United States in the Constitution relating to money; Analysis of the clauses of the Constitution about the emission of bills and making paper a legal tender; Explanation of the power of Congress in making a paper currency.

BANK deposit laws, MONEY, PUBLIC opinion, and LEGAL tender

The article presents a discussion related to the consideration of deposits as currency in the U.S. In the discussions upon the various phases of the currency question during the last twenty years, the popular dread of contraction and its consequences has seldom been appealed to in vain. The U.S. Congress has been a good index of public opinion in this respect, and in the Congress there has steadily been an element which seemed to have grasped the idea of a connection between contraction and falling prices, as the one and sufficient key to the practical questions which were to be settled. To this fact were due the weak legislation of 1874, to go back no further, and the necessity in 1875 of so framing the Resumption Act as to leave its meaning open to opposite constructions and its operation uncertain. Nothing else than a deep conviction in Congress that the people would not stand contraction can explain the fact that the act of May 31, 1878, to forbid the further retirement of legal tender notes, was carried through the House of Representatives.

TARIFF laws, CONFERENCES & conventions, COMMERCIAL treaties, FREE trade, and LEGISLATIVE bills

The article focuses on proposed tariff legislation since 1883 in the U.S. During the last two U.S. congresses, several attempts have been made to secure modification and reduction of the customs duties as they were left by the act of 1883. The first session of the Forty-eighth Congress lasted from December 3, 1888 to July 7, 1884. The Democrats were in a decided majority in the House, having 198 members, against 126 Republicans and Independents. On March 21, a conference of "free trade" Democratic leaders was held, at which it was decided to call a general party caucus to decide what action should be taken on the bill. On April 15, the motion to go into Committee of the Whole, for the consideration of the tariff bill, was carried without division. At the same session of the Congress, three attempts at special tariff legislation are worthy of notice: the Converse wool bill, to restore the duties of 1867 on raw wool; Amendment to the shipping bill; A bill on reducing the duty on works of art from 20 to 10 per cent.

INTERNATIONAL trade, INTERSTATE commerce laws, JUDGES, and APPELLATE courts

Examines how laws are distinguished on principle from regulations of foreign or interstate commerce within the exclusive power of the U.S. Congress. Cause of the hesitancy of the judges to lay down general principles upon the distinction between laws affecting foreign or interstate commerce; Controversies over the commercial power of Congress; Specifications of the case of Gibbons versus Ogden wherein the U.S. Supreme Court construed the clause in the Federal Constitution conferring power upon Congress to regulate commerce with foreign nations and among several states.

COMMITTEES, TRUSTS & trustees, UNITED States manufacturing industries, COMPETITION, RESTRAINT of trade, COMMERCIAL policy, and INTERNATIONAL competition

The article reports that the U.S. House of Representatives of the Fiftieth Congress passed a resolution directing its Committee on Manufactures to inquire about associations, trusts or others like titles, alleged to exist in the country for purpose of controlling or curtailing production or supply of various products on January 25, 1888. Authority was given the committee to sit during sessions of the House, to compel the presence of persons and papers, and to swear and examine witnesses. A number of litigations involving the nature and doings of trusts, monopolies, and the like, have recently come to judgment in the courts; and the findings upon them are now of record. Profits may also be distributed as a particular means of maintaining the combination intact. It is every wise extremely confusing to class all the above-named enterprises as trusts. They have in common only the single feature of excluding more or less perfectly old-fashioned individualism of management. It will be noticed that the industries surest to have such an evolution are precisely those among which international competition now prevails. The interest hitherto centered in the tariff question will then go over to that of trusts.

COMMERCIAL law, CONSTITUTIONS, LAW, QUARANTINE -- Law & legislation, and PUBLIC health laws

Discusses the limitations imposed by the U.S. Federal Constitution on the right of the states to enact quarantine laws. Regulations of commerce permissible to the states; Power of Congress to regulate commerce; Conflict of state supplementary laws with the regulation exercised by Congress; Bases upon which the quarantine laws are to be sustained

TAX laws, DIRECT taxation, INDIRECT taxation, WEALTH tax, and TAX accounting

This article presents information on the Direct Tax of 1861, an act passed by the U.S. Congress on August 5, 1861. The direct tax laid by the act of Congress of August 5, 1861, was the fifth levy which has been made under the provisions of the Constitution, requiring that representation and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several States, according to their respective numbers. There would be little risk in predicting that this will also be the last resort to a method of taxation which the framers of the Constitution thought important enough to hold a place in one of the difficult compromises embodied in that instrument. The distinction between direct and indirect taxation, resting upon the supposed method of incidence upon a single class of persons, is fully developed. It was a necessary result of their reasoning, became familiar in all the discussions of the school in France, and, was carried to the knowledge of readers in political science in other countries, during the short-lived pre-eminence of the physiocrats.

During the first century of the occupation of Manhattan Island by Europeans we find there two settlements of Lutherans, the one of an earlier, the other of a later date. The earlier settlement was that of Dutch Lutherans, who came over from Holland with the first settlers, whilst some seventy-five years later German Lutherans began to arrive, at first in smaller and then in ever increasing numbers until many thousands had settled mainly along the Hudson and Mohawk rivers. It is now two hundred years ago that the first colony of German Lutherans arrived in the harbor of New York. They were the Palatinates who, in 1707, because of continued political and religious disturbances, had with their pastor, the Rev. Josua von Kocherthal, left the fatherland, and found a new home near where the city of Newburgh now stands. It goes without saying, that though most of them settled along the Hudson and Mohawk rivers, yet many of them remained on the Island of Manhattan. Whilst the immigration of Lutherans from Holland, after the middle of the eighteenth century practically ceased, that of the German Lutherans increased, and the Lutheran Church on Manhattan which at first was Dutch afterwards became German. And this first German Lutheran Church in the present city of New York had the good fortune to have among its pastors some of the most distinguished men and theologians of the eighteenth century, such as the patriarch of the Lutheran Church in this country, the Rev. Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, D.D., and his son, the Rev. Frederick Augustus Conrad Muhlenberg, a man of burning patriotism, who in time became speaker of the First and Third Congresses of the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

SILVER coins, TREASURY bills, GOVERNMENT securities, GOLD standard, CURRENCY question, and BANK deposits

This article focuses on the silver situation in the United States. The laws of the United States authorize the U.S. Treasury Department to receive deposits of standard silver dollars and to issue certificates therefore in denominations of one dollar and upwards, and to receive gold coin and to issue certificates therefore in denominations of twenty dollars and upwards. The premium on gold or the discount on silver may be arrested, if it comes, by fresh legislation. The people who have silver dollars, silver certificates, greenbacks, and national bank-notes in their pockets or on deposit in bank, for which they have paid, in labor or property, one hundred cents per dollar gold value, may demand of Congress that their money be restored to that value. If they do so demand, in some way it will be done. The banks cannot hold the immense mass of deposits and clearings at the gold standard, when the government's legal tender notes are redeemed only in silver. The premium on their gold will be the property of their shareholders, and may be applied to an extra dividend or added to their surplus.

POLICE power, ADMINISTRATIVE law, INTERSTATE commerce, PROHIBITION of alcohol, and LIQUORS

The article focuses on the relation of the police power to inter-state commerce in the U.S. The majority of the Court there decided that a State law prohibiting the sale of intoxicating liquors, except for specified purposes, is void as to liquors imported from another State and sold by the importer in the original package. The most important power possessed by a government is the power to protect its citizens from danger, disease, and vice. This power can be called the police power, and not being delegated to Congress by the Constitution, is reserved to the States exclusively.

TOBACCO taxes, TAX laws, INTERNAL revenue law, and CIVIL war

This article focuses on taxation of tobacco in 1891. New systems of taxation and the extension of old ones are the invariable accompaniments of great wars. By the Civil War in the U.S. an enormous strain was put on a fiscal system that for nearly half a century had been on a peace footing. The tariff was quickly increased, but a disturbed foreign trade proved to be a poor source from which to draw the sinews of war. Early in 1862, the U.S. Congress entered upon the subject of laying internal taxes, but found itself in dangerous and unknown fields. Such taxes had always been unpopular. Thus there were no guides to the problem, what taxes were best adapted to American conditions of scattered population and aversion to restrictions, or what were most likely to meet public favor. The internal revenue act of July 1, 1862, was distinctly a war measure, drafted under the pressure of needs almost overwhelming. In European governments, tobacco was already among the chief sources of revenue, being taxed both in the leaf and in the manufactured forms.

PUBLICATIONS, BOOKS, PERIODICALS, MONETARY policy, and FINANCIAL management

The article presents a lists of books and periodicals on different topics of economics. Some of the books listed here are "On the Principle of Wealth Creation: Its Nature, Origin, Evolution, and Corollaries"; "Mathematical Investigations in the Theory of Value and Prices"; and "Dictionary of Political Economy." Some other publications are "Economic Causes of Moral Progress"; "Methods of Industrial Peace"; "Capital and Labor: Their relative Strength"; "General Booth's Social Work"; "Taxation and Work: A Series of Treatises on the Tariff and the Currency"; "The Tariff: What it Is, and What it Does"; "The Economy of High Wages. An Inquiry into the Comparative Methods and Cost of Production of Competing Industries in the United States and Europe"; "The Case against Bimetallism"; "The Monetary Question in 1892"; "The World's Exchanges of Standard Metals"; "A New Standard of Value"; "Fancy Monetary Standards"; "Influence on Business of the Independent Treasury" and "History of Banking Under the Continental Congress and Federal Constitution."

GOVERNMENT corporations, JURISDICTION, CIRCUIT courts, CONSTITUTIONAL law, GOVERNMENT business enterprises, and REPEAL of legislation

Argues that the United States Congress should abrogate federal jurisdiction over state corporations provided for in the Judiciary Act of Congress of March 3, 1887. Circuit Court cognizance of suits in favor of assignees, against corporations as parties, upon their obligations passing by delivery; Background on how the word corporation appeared in the Judiciary Act; Scope of the word citizen in a relevant clause of the Constitution; Opinion of Judge Joseph P. Bradley.

WOOL textiles, TARIFF, COMMERCIAL policy, EXPORT subsidies, and IMPORTERS

The article discusses the effects of the policy related to duties on wool and woolens in the U.S. followed during the last twenty-five years and the probable effects of the policy which is to come. In the quarter of a century which has now elapsed since the passage of the wool and woolens tariff act of 1867, the system of duties then established, and since maintained in its essential features, has gradually come to be the crucial part of the protective policy. The bill presented in 1877-1878 session proposed to put wool on the free list and to reduce correspondingly the duties on woolens. Whatever uncertainty there may be as to the disposition of other parts of the protective system at the hands of the present Congress, it may be assumed as settled that the wool duty will go, and that the system of 1867 will be replaced by a fundamentally different regime. The questions to be asked in considering the effects of a given duty are as to the domestic production and the imports, and the relative importance of these two sources of supply.

ACTIONS & defenses (Law), COURTS, BROKERS, AMERICAN law, and LABOR unions

The article presents information on recent court cases. In one of the case, a customer and a broker buying and selling stocks upon margins stand in the relation of pledger and pledgee and the fact that the broker has an implied right of repledging stocks does not change the relation. An Act of Congress, after continuing the laws then in force for the exclusion of Chinese from the United States, provides for the removal of Chinese not lawfully within this country, requiring that all Chinese laborers entitled to remain in the United States shall obtain certificates of residence from persons authorized by the act to give them, under penalty of removal on failure to do so within one year. In another case a plaintiff was a non-union man working for a clothing house under a contract by which he could be discharged at the end of any week, but he was told that he would be permanently employed. The local union labor organization informed his employers that unless plaintiff were discharged they would have to inform all labor organizations of the city that the house was a non-union one.

ANTITRUST law, COMMERCIAL crimes, COMMERCIAL trusts, TRADE regulation, UNFAIR competition, and MONOPOLIES

Examines the notion of monopoly under the Anti-Trust Act, passed by the United States Congress on July 2, 1890. Interpretation of the statute in the light of the common law; Definition of a monopoly; Engrossing; Results of leading decisions regarding monopoly; Indefinite increase of business; Fixing of arbitrary prices; Agreement not to trade with any one who trades with others than the convenantors.