Excerpt from Open Mints and Free Banking This little book, begun in the summer of 1896, was originally planned in the form of two magazine articles, but I soon found that to fully set forth my reasons for the changes I suggest in our monetary laws would involve a more extended discussion of principles than could be compressed into the space at command. This change of plan, occurring when the excitement of a pending Presidential election made dispassionate and unbiased writing as difficult as it was important, led to the laying aside of the work for a time; which fact explains why the statistics given in the book are t altogether up to date. But as the figures are used only to illustrate my argument, and as the deductions drawn from them would t be altered by later statements, I have allowed them to stand. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art techlogy to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.