What is money worth in this country? The discussions at Washington, and the prices of government bonds, seem to show that it is worth between two and three per cent., and there is not much doubt that a hundred-year government bond bearing only two per cent. would sell at par. An incident in New York City confirms this opinion. A recent call for bids on city bonds bearing three per cent. interest, and payable in five years or thirty, at the will of the city, was answered by bids for six times the amount required at from par up to 103⅓. If short New York threes are at a premium, a long government two would be worth par. Why, then, it will be asked, do we pay from six to ten per cent. in different parts of the country? The answer is that risk and superintendence of short loans makes the difference. The real value of money is found by taking for a measure long loans, in which there is absolutely no risk. The Times of New York expresses the opinion that thirty-year threes of that city would sell at 115.
A correspondent of the New York Evening Post furnishes some interesting incidents in the life of Joel Barlow, the father of American epic poetry. Redding, Conn., was the early home of Barlow, and the visitor is shown the house in which the poet constructed his commencement poem in 1778. It is said that Barlow’s one romance was a common one among college students. He fell in love with a sweet girl whom he privately married soon after graduation. He served as a chaplain in the Continental army, but at Redding he is best remembered as the promoter of several industrial enterprises designed to promote the welfare of the town. Barlow was not a great father of our epic, but his sons have, perhaps, not greatly surpassed him.
The enthusiasm of science, in alliance with the passion of boys for killing birds, is making trouble in Massachusetts. The taxidermists want birds to stuff, and average boys want to slay birds. The law is loose, and any boy can get a license to kill birds in the service of science. The dead birds are oftener eaten than stuffed. The song birds and insectivorous birds are rapidly diminishing. Of course the boys rob the nests of the birds and kill the young in the nests. There is a period in a boy’s life when he loves such work. Maine has abolished the system of licensing taxidermists, in consequence of the wholesale slaughter of birds that went on under that system.
There is no doubt that the tobacco habit, or any other bad habit, can be more easily overcome with the aid of prayer than without it. But there are two objections to a common way of stating the case. The first is that many tobacco users have ceased using it without the aid of prayer. The second objection is that there is danger of teaching that men cannot reform bad habits without special divine help. The word we spell c-a-n-t has two meanings, and both are present in the plea of helplessness. It is understood, of course, that God helps men who help themselves; that is the reason why a wicked farmer can raise good crops by being a good agriculturist, though he is a bad sinner.
Congress is struggling with a foreign copyright bill. The bill is a bungling one and really opens the American market to free trade in books. This may be desirable, but it is well to keep distinct measures in different baskets. The free book question belongs in the tariff bill. International copyright means putting a foreign author on a level with the home author. We ought to do it without delay, but we need not confer any favors on foreign publishers in a copyright bill. We have international patent-right, but we did not think it necessary when we protected the foreign inventor to put the foreign maker of the inventor’s machines under shelter of the “Free List.”