Vat- 
 
 Cataloged 
 
 SOUND MONE 
 
 Bimetalism a Necessity of the World, 
 
 The Existing Ratio of Parity, 16, 154, 15 to 1, Unalterable. 
 
 THE UNITED STATES COMPETENT TO RE-ESTABEISH 
 BIMETAEISM BY RE-OPENING HER MINTS TO SIL- 
 VER, WITHOUT FOREIGN CO-OPERATION. 
 
 BY ROBERT W. HUGHES. 
 
 "Sound money is that sort of currency which has the most universal and least fluctuat- 
 ing purchasing power in the markets of all countries; is that which is the best and least 
 fluctuating measure of value and medium of exchange." — Secretary Mortox. 
 
 "The money of the world should he a fair and permanent record of obligations over long 
 periods of time." — A. J. Balfour. 
 
 " If we take a survey of mankind in ancient or modern times, as regards the physical, 
 mechanical and intellectual forces of nations, we find nothing to compare with the United 
 States in this present year of 1895. The wealth of the American people surpasses that of any 
 other nation, past or present. * * * The United States in 1895 possess by far the 
 greatest productive power in the world. This power has more than trebled since 1860. The 
 accumulation of wealth averages $7,000,000 daily. Yet there may be impartial critics who 
 would go so far as to assert that Americans might have turned to greater advantage the 
 elements at their disposal."— Mvlhall, in JTorth American Review for June, 1S95. 
 
 i 
 
 Wit, ELLIS JONES, PRINTER, RICHMOND, VA. 
 
 1895. 
 
 

 
 i\ 
 
 V 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 The following essays were published in various newspapers at 
 the times of their respective dates. The statistics which they em- 
 body might be brought down to the present time, but that would 
 seem unnecessary. The excellent platform of the Cook County 
 Democrats, of Illinois, is published as an epitome of the princi- 
 ples which I have endeavored to elucidate in these essa} r s. I have 
 endeavored to use as little repetition as possible in this collective 
 publication. 
 
 ROBERT W. HUGHES. 
 
PAMPHLET COLLECTION THF F, OWrpc; 
 uEffiUNTVEBSTTYUBPARY 
 
 W » rPTtni\j 
 
 SOUND MONEY. 
 
 The Eatio of Parity. Why Holi the International Conference ? 
 
 THE LAW OF NATURE. 
 
 ENGLAND'S DOMINATION AT WASHINGTON— NO THREAT- 
 ENING OVER-PRODUCTION OF SILVER— NOT 
 PLENTY THAT MAKES TROUBLE. 
 
 Who hold the balance of the world? Who reign 
 
 O'er Congress, whether royalist or liberal ? 
 Who make our morning journals squeak and gibber-all, 
 
 Who keep the world, both old and new, in pain 
 Or pleasure ? Who make polities run glibber-all ? 
 
 Jew Rothschild and his fellow Christian, Baring. 
 
 Those are the lords to-day. Every loan 
 
 Is not merely a speculative hit ; 
 But seats a nation or upsets a throne. 
 
 Republics also get involved a bit ; 
 Columbia's stocks hath holders not unknown 
 On Change. 
 
 Norfolk, May 16, 1895. 
 To the Editor of the Dispatch : 
 
 Mr. Edwards Pierrepont was our Minister to England for 
 several years during General Grant's administration. He was a 
 citizen of New York. He naturally gave much attention to finan- 
 cial subjects during his residence in London. He was always an 
 earnest bimetalist. He was an able writer on the subject, and 
 thoroughly conversant with it. Some time before the stealthy 
 demonetization of silver in the United States by the legislation of 
 1873, he had become aware of the formation of their gold trust by 
 the principal bankers of Europe, the chief object of which was to 
 
4 SOUND MONEY. 
 
 bring- about in the United States the enactment of 1873, as they 
 had done the action of Germany in 1871. 
 
 ISTot long ago, in an article in the North American Review, Mr. 
 Pierrepont said: "There are no silver mines of importance in 
 the British Empire, but gold mines of vast production. To keep 
 up the price of this metal by artificial means England formed a 
 trust long before the oil or sugar trust was formed in America. 
 She gave free coinage to gold, and not to silver, and passed an act 
 of Parliament compelling the Bank of England to purchase all 
 the gold offered at 3 pounds 17 shillings and 9 pence per ounce 
 standard," etc., etc. 
 
 The amount of coined gold money in use among the civilized 
 nations being supposed to be something more than 3,500 millions of 
 dollars the object of the Gold Trust was to obtain control of this 
 money. It is said that the Rothschilds alone now control 2,000 
 millions of it. Six sevenths of the whole is supposed to be in 
 control of the trust. They sought control of money in order to 
 control prices. With all their wealth the Gold Trust knew they 
 would be unable to control the gold of civilized nations if there 
 were a greater amount of legal-tender silver money circulating in 
 the hands of the people. 
 
 The demonetization of silver was therefore an essential part of 
 their scheme. They early set to work to effect this object. They 
 succeeded in Germany. They had a still easier success in our 
 Congress, by means of secrecy and treachery. 
 
 THE GOLD TRUST VS. THE AMERICAN PEOPLE. 
 
 This grand coup was accomplished in 1873 by stealth; for it is 
 the right of the American people to pass at the polls upon every 
 great measure of government. Yet a policy of finance more sub- 
 versive of popular liberty and more destructive of domestic pros- 
 perity than any ever before conceived by the human mind was 
 secretly established in our republic in 1873, without the sanction, 
 even without the knowledge, of the people. Stolen measures are 
 not often honest measures. Gold monometalism in this country 
 is the goods of a theft. But all great frauds recoil upon their per- 
 petrators. The American people are about to assert their right to 
 pass upon this policy. They are going to exercise this high pre- 
 rogative and say, "Let it stand," or, "Let it fall." The campaign 
 
SOUND MONEY. 5 
 
 of education is begun, and the authors of the policy, forced out 
 of their tactics of stealth and secrecy, must at last meet their 
 adversaries face to face, toe to toe. 
 
 I wish to sav something about the ratio of parity between the 
 two money metals ; something about the proposed call of an inter- 
 national conference for settling this ratio, and something on the 
 interesting question whether gold or silver is the steadier, the 
 sounder, the more honest of the two monies. 
 
 WHETHER NATURE OR BANKERS CONTROL. 
 
 With many students of finance the pons asinorum in the way of 
 a return to the constitutional policy of bimetalism is the supposed 
 necessitv of securing beforehand, bv international agreement, a 
 conventional ratio of parity between gold and silver. The mistake 
 of such students is in assuming that this much desired ratio is a thing 
 of artificial ascertainment and contrivance, to be mathematically 
 worked out by ingenious minds, and dogmatically decreed by 
 some Sanhedrim of miscegenated savans, Semitically dominated, 
 and convened from Europe and America for the purpose. On the 
 contrary, the ratio is a self-established fact resulting by evolution, 
 automatically, from the natural conditions affecting the two metals 
 all the world over. 
 
 I am not much given to superstition, but I believe that a wise 
 and beneficent Creator designed this earth for human habitation, 
 and provided here all things which could be useful and necessary 
 to the well-being and happiness of the human race which He 
 placed upon it. Among His many gifts were two very remarkable 
 ones. First, He gave us language and letters with which, by 
 speech and writing, we may express our thoughts to each other in 
 a manner necessary to high civilization, and unknown and impos- 
 sible to the dumb beasts which He made subject to our uses. The 
 other of these gifts was money, by means of which we might carry 
 on the work, traffic and business of society with perfect facility, 
 convenience, accuracy and confidence. From the earliest histoiw, 
 through all the periods of time down to our own day, gold and 
 silver have been the universal money of mankind. Local experi- 
 ment has occasionally been made with other substances, but in 
 every instance it has ended in speedy and disgusting failure. The 
 only money which has stood the test of ages, the only money of 
 
6 SOUND MONEY. 
 
 nature and nature's God, current all over the earth, has been gold 
 and silver. This great fact, this amazing miracle, the contempla- 
 tion of which fills every thoughtful soul with gratitude to the 
 Giver of all good and perfect gifts, is so familiar and universal a8 
 to have become commonplace; so that in our enlightened age there 
 are men who essay to improve upon the work of Almighty God, 
 and think they can tinker successfully with the subject of money 
 by interfering with the materials which have constituted it from 
 time immemorial. If I may use the privilege of Mr. Cleveland, 
 and indulge in mere dogmatism, I will say that, as surely as there 
 are settled laws of nature, as surely as this gift of money to man- 
 kind conies from a higher than human source, this tinkering will 
 come to grief. The ratio of metals is one of the facts of money, 
 fixed by a higher power than man's, fixed by a friend of the human 
 race, fixed by the ordination of One more honest than any petty 
 king of the London Gold Trust. 
 
 Sir Roderick Murchison, one of the most learned and highly 
 respected financial writers of modern times, states the principle of 
 ratio in these words : " The quantities of gold and silver procur- 
 able will prove no more than sufficient to meet the exigencies of 
 an enormously increased population and an augmenting commerce 
 and industry. Providence seems to have originally adjusted the 
 relative values of the precious metals, and the fact that their rela- 
 tions have remained the same for ages will survive all theories." 
 
 AUTOMATICALLY WORKED OUT BY NATURE. 
 
 Let us examine what lesson is taught by the facts of the subject. 
 I will first premise, and then prove, that the existing ratios have 
 been determined automatically, and not by contrivance. They 
 are 16 to 1 in America, where nearly all silver is produced, and 
 where it is cheapest; 15^ to 1 in Europe, where it becomes a lit- 
 tle dearer by transportation, and much of it coined and recoined 
 at expense, and 15 to 1 in Asia and the East, after it has undergone 
 still further transportation at additional expense. These ratios are 
 practically one and the same, and we speak of them in America, 
 for brevity's sake, as 16 to 1. 
 
 How did this ratio come about? ISTo international conference 
 ever agreed upon or decreed it. Such a decree would have been 
 brutum fulmen. - The ratio cannot be the subject of dogmatic ful- 
 
SOUND MONEY. 7 
 
 mination. It comes from a very simple fact. Suppose there were 
 16,000 millions of ounces of silver in the world in use as money. 
 Suppose there were 1,000 millions of ounces of gold in the world, 
 also in use as money. Suppose that the use of both of these sorts 
 and quantities of money, interchangeably, was convenient and 
 agreeable to mankind and universally customary ; then that very 
 fact of the use in common and interchangeably of these respective 
 quantities of money would establish the ratio of parity between 
 the two metals at 16 to 1. 
 
 It is equally true that if at any time the amounts of the two 
 metals in circulation among mankind, stated in francs, or dollars, 
 or guineas, or other coins, are equal to each other — as, for instance, 
 if there are 3,500 millions of dollars' worth of gold in use and the 
 same number of dollars' worth of silver also in use, both moneys 
 in common, interchangeable use — then this equality of aggregate 
 values in use will demonstrate that there is some ratio of parity 
 existing between the two metals; and if, the aggregate values 
 being the same, the individual coins of silver are so many times 
 heavier than the gold coins of the same value, then that so many 
 times is the automatic ratio of parity existing between the two 
 metals. This ratio has been 15 or 16 to 1 for ages, and it is this 
 ratio which Sir Roderick Murchison refers to when he says it will 
 " survive all theories." 
 
 The Director of the Mint, in his report for 1894, page 45, gives 
 as the stock of silver in the world, coined and uncoined, but 
 chiefly coined, $4,055,700,000. 
 
 He gives as the like stock of gold in the world, page 44, 
 $3,965,900,000. He states these to be the approximate quantities 
 of the two metals visible and reported. They, of course, do not 
 include what is in private hoards, or in the pockets of individuals, 
 or very much of what is in the use of uncivilized populations. 
 His statements of the visible stocks are supposed to be somewhat 
 less than one-half of the total quantity of each of the precious 
 metals in the world. 
 
 THIS PRACTICAL EQUALITY. 
 
 These quantities in value given by the mint report of the stocks 
 of the two metals visible and in use are nearly equal to each other, 
 the difference being only ninety millions. 
 
8 SOUND MONEY. 
 
 This practical equality in value of the amounts of the two 
 metals in use proves that the ratio on which these values are esti- 
 mated and the metals are coined, of 16 to 1, is not the creature of 
 human contrivance, but is the automatic result of natural laws. 
 
 The ratio of 16 to 1 prevails because the quantities of the two 
 metals which God's gift of the mines and man's industry in work- 
 ing them have produced have been such relatively as to have 
 established that ratio. The ratio of 16 to 1 is a necessary auto- 
 matic corollary of the world's quantities in stock of the two 
 metals. 
 
 The Mint Report for 1894 gives, pages 174-175, the quantities of 
 each metal produced in the world in each year from 1492 to 1894, 
 a period of 402 years. The total for the period was, of gold 
 406,306,476 ounces, and of silver, 7,664,023,716 ounces. Multiply 
 the gold by 16 and we get 6,500,900,616 ounces. On the basis of 
 16 to 1 the quantities of the two metals produced was within 
 $1,163,000,000 of the same number of ounces for the 402 years, 
 or within an average of 2,900,000 ounces a year in the 402 years. 
 
 Stated in values instead of quantities, the production of gold 
 in the period according to the mint report was $8,399,101,000 
 worth; and of silver $9,909,041,000 worth, valued at the ratio of 
 15J to 1. That is to say, in the long period of more than four 
 hundred years the excess of silver production over that of gold 
 was only $1,509,940,000 worth, valued at the ratio of 15 J to 1, the 
 excess of silver being only $3,774,850 worth a year. When we 
 consider that silver is the money of the million and not of bank- 
 ers ; that it is in constant, daily use, and not stored in vaults ; that 
 it is more carelessly handled than gold and more liable to be lost 
 on land and sea and is more subject to abrasion and casualty, we 
 are bound to conclude that this difference in production is oblit- 
 erated, and that nature has provided this small excess of produc- 
 tion in silver over gold to meet such losses as have been described, 
 and thereby preserve the equilibrium of the two metals on the 
 natural ratio of 16 to 1. 
 
 NATURE IS ABLE TO MAINTAIN IT. 
 
 As to the ability of nature and nature's God to maintain the 
 value of silver at the ratio of 16 to 1, compared with gold, we 
 have no lack of proof. A table is given below, taken from the 
 
SOUND MONEY. 
 
 9 
 
 Mint Report of 1891, page 158, showing the commercial value of 
 silver compared with gold during the period extending from the 
 beginning of the present century down to 1873, when silver was 
 demonetized in the United States. The table shows the ratio 
 value of silver compared with gold, as metals sold in the market 
 by weight, in each year of the period 1800 to 1873. The legal 
 ratio being 16 to 1, it will be borne in mind by the reader that 
 when the table shows the comparative value of silver to be 16, 
 silver has been at a commercial parity with gold, and whenever 
 the numeral has been less than 16 silver has been at a premium 
 over gold. Here is the table : (See Mint Keport, page 158.) 
 
 1801, silver compared with 
 
 1802, 
 
 1803, 
 
 1804, 
 
 1805, 
 
 1806, 
 
 1807, 
 
 1808, 
 
 1809, 
 
 1810, 
 
 1811, 
 
 1812, 
 
 1813, 
 
 1814, 
 
 1815, 
 
 1816, 
 
 1817, 
 
 1818, 
 
 1819, 
 
 1820, 
 
 1821, 
 
 1822, 
 
 1823, 
 
 1824, 
 
 1825, 
 
 1826, 
 
 1827, 
 
 1828, 
 
 1829, 
 
 1830, 
 
 1831, 
 
 1832, 
 
 1833, 
 
 1834, 
 
 gold 15 . 46 
 
 15.26 
 
 15.41 
 
 15.41 
 
 1579 
 
 15 52 
 
 15.43 
 
 16.08 
 
 15.96 
 
 15.77 
 
 15 53 
 
 16.11 
 
 16.25 
 
 15 04 
 
 15.26 
 
 15.28 
 
 15.11 
 
 15.35 
 
 15.33 
 
 15.62 
 
 15.95 
 
 .'. ... 15.80 
 
 15 . 84 
 
 15.82 
 
 15 70 
 
 15.76 
 
 15.74 
 
 15 78 
 
 15.78 
 
 15.82 
 
 15 72 
 
 15.72 
 
 15.93 
 
 15.73 
 
10 
 
 SOUND MONEY. 
 
 1835, sil 
 
 ver compared with j 
 
 1S36, 
 
 
 u 
 
 1837, 
 
 
 li 
 
 1838. 
 
 
 M 
 
 1839, 
 
 
 11 
 
 1840, 
 
 
 a 
 
 1841, 
 
 
 u 
 
 1842, 
 
 
 u 
 
 1843, 
 
 
 (( 
 
 1S44, 
 
 
 u 
 
 1845, 
 
 
 u 
 
 1846, 
 
 
 a 
 
 1847, 
 
 
 u 
 
 1848, 
 
 
 a 
 
 1849, 
 
 
 a 
 
 1850, 
 
 
 u 
 
 1851, 
 
 
 u 
 
 1852, 
 
 
 (i 
 
 1853, 
 
 
 it 
 
 1854, 
 
 
 ti 
 
 1 855, 
 
 
 U 
 
 1856, 
 
 
 it 
 
 1857, 
 
 
 u 
 
 1858, 
 
 
 c( 
 
 1859, 
 
 
 l( 
 
 1860, 
 
 
 U 
 
 1861, 
 
 
 a 
 
 1862, 
 
 
 It 
 
 1863, 
 
 
 tt 
 
 1864, 
 
 
 u 
 
 1865, 
 
 
 « 
 
 1866, 
 
 
 a 
 
 1867, 
 
 
 a 
 
 1S68, 
 
 
 a 
 
 1869, 
 
 
 u 
 
 1870, 
 
 
 11 
 
 1871, 
 
 
 a 
 
 1872, 
 
 
 a 
 
 1873, 
 
 
 a 
 
 lo 
 
 15. 
 15. 
 15. 
 15. 
 15. 
 15. 
 15. 
 15. 
 15. 
 15. 
 15. 
 15. 
 15. 
 15. 
 15. 
 15. 
 15. 
 15. 
 15. 
 15. 
 15. 
 15. 
 15. 
 15. 
 15. 
 15. 
 15. 
 15. 
 15. 
 15. 
 15. 
 15. 
 15. 
 15. 
 15. 
 15. 
 15. 
 15. 
 
 80 
 72 
 83 
 85 
 62 
 62 
 70 
 87 
 93 
 85 
 92 
 90 
 80 
 85 
 78 
 70 
 46 
 59 
 33 
 33 
 38 
 38 
 27 
 38 
 19 
 29 
 50 
 35 
 
 44 
 43 
 57 
 59 
 60 
 57 
 57 
 63 
 92 
 
 It will be seen that in only three of the seventy-three years has 
 the comparative value of silver been as low as 16 to 1. It has 
 been more valuable than gold at 16 to 1 throughout the period 
 named — that is to say, in every year but three it has taken less 
 silver than sixteen ounces to buy an equal quantity of gold — and 
 silver has been at a commercial premium. 
 
SOUND MONEY. 11 
 
 England's domination at Washington. 
 
 Even if considered with reference to the European ratio of 15| 
 to 1, silver was relatively more valuable than gold in twenty-three 
 years of the present century previous to its demonetization. Apro- 
 pos of the apparently superior value of gold in the other fifty 
 years of the period, it is to be observed that the Director of our 
 Mint takes his quotations from the London sales; and that these 
 are notoriously cooked as much as possible against silver, it being 
 the policy of England to cheapen American silver in order that 
 her profit on it when sent to the East may be greater. 
 
 The Director of the Mint avows that these quotations are of sales 
 in London. Does he not know that there silver is demonetized, 
 and that it sells there of necessity below its money value? Wh} T 
 did he not give the quotations of American sales ? How pitiably 
 true is it that our Treasury Department is little else than a pro- 
 vincial bureau of the Bank of England, more absolutely domina- 
 ted by it than the British Exchequer itself. Our Treasury officers 
 do their work and make up their reports under the infatuating 
 spell of the Basilisk of the Thames, whose gaze transfixes them 
 and paralizes every sentiment of manly Americanism in their 
 natures. 
 
 If the same page of the mint report from which the foregoing 
 ratios have been copied be consulted it will be seen that for 114 
 years before the beginning of the present century silver w T as more 
 valuable than gold, even measured by the European ratio of 15J 
 to 1, except in four years — that is to say, was more valuable in 
 110 years out of 114, even in sales in London. 
 
 These tables teach, however, that throughout the period of 
 nearly two centuries the differences and variations in relative 
 value between the tw r o metals, were so inconsiderable and trivial 
 as to have been of no material importance. They were practically 
 the same, and they illustrate the truth of Sir Roderick Murchi- 
 son's remark, that nature furnishes the two metals in such relative 
 quantities as to establish and maintain the ratio of 15 or 16 to 1 
 en permanence. 
 
 This steadiness of relative value, as shown by the figures that 
 have been given, are marvellous. JSTo intelligent mind, no rev- 
 erent student of the subject, can fail to feel that any arbitrary 
 
12 SOUND MONEY. 
 
 and artificial disturbance of this ratio would be revolutionary, 
 abnormal, and in its consequences pernicious, if not in its spirit 
 impious. Have we not already experienced very baleful results 
 from the blunder and crime of 1871-73, when Germany and the 
 United States surrendered their financial independence to Eng- 
 land ? Why should England be permitted to enter into a con- 
 ference held in the interest of silver which she refuses to respect 
 as money, and w T hich she has plotted against for eighty years ? \ 
 
 NATURE SCORNS TO HELP THOSE WHO REJECT HER GIFTS. 
 
 For nothing cau be more destructive to the long-established 
 ratio between the values of the two metals that has been described 
 than the demonetization of one of them. In order that either 
 shall retain its value relatively to the other it must be in full and 
 untrammelled use as money. In order to be money, it must pos- 
 sess two requisites — it must be legal tender by fiat of the muni- 
 cipal law, and it must enjoy the privilege in the public mints of 
 being converted into coins in the manner prescribed by law. If 
 denied either of these privileges, either of the precious metals, 
 except so much of it as consists of coins already minted and 
 already enjoying the function of legal tender, ceases to hold its 
 money value, and becomes a mere commodity of the market. It 
 can be money only when in the form of coins. 
 
 The principal value of the precious metals is derived from their 
 use as money. If any article of value to the human race be de- 
 prived of the use for which it is intended by nature it will fall in 
 price. If by some infatuation mankind were induced by design- 
 ing men to refuse to make use of wheat and corn for daily food, 
 even those prime necessaries of life would lose most of their value 
 in the market. A Virginia farmer the other day, after reading 
 this essay as published in the Dispatch, said, in referring to Mr. 
 Cleveland's idea of depreciated silver dollars, " wheat and corn 
 would go down lower too if the people were fool enough to quit 
 eating them." 
 
 iSTature establishes the ratio of parity between gold and silver 
 only as money. It ceases to perform this office when, with sacri- 
 legious hand, the minions of Mammon degrade either of the 
 metals into merchandise. As long as both are upheld as money 
 by municipal law, nature establishes their relative values automa- 
 
SOUND MONEY. 18 
 
 tically. It is true that the ratio of nature varies slightly with 
 varying times, circumstances and conditions, and that this tendency 
 to inconsiderable variations needs to be steadied by artificial laws 
 of legal tender and coinage. But these laws act simply as the 
 balance-wheel acts in regulating the movement of machinery; 
 they fix and hold steady the ratio which nature, by her own great 
 laws, has alreadv established. There can be no international con- 
 ference competent to fix a ratio for the two money metals which 
 shall not have nature and nature's God as constituent members of 
 it, and I am inclined to believe that these two financiers can estab- 
 lish a firm and sound ratio better without the aid of Gentile and 
 Jew conferrees than with it. 
 
 SILVEK A SOUNDER AND STEADIER MONEY. 
 
 If experience and history establish any truth in finance, it is 
 that silver, so louff as it is used and maintained as monev. is of 
 more steady and certain value than gold. Systems of finance 
 based on gold are notoriously panicky. Those based on silver are 
 subject to comparatively few and slight perturbations. Those 
 based on both moneys are as steady as the North Star. 
 
 They have gold monometalism in the country which is now the 
 financial sovereign of the United States. For full two generations 
 England has been conspicuous for the frecpaeney and violence of 
 its commercial, banking and monetary panics. The rate of inter- 
 est of the Bank of England is a financial barometer, whose changes 
 indicate with infallible certainty the revolutions that occur in the 
 money market of London. This rate was changed no less than 
 223 times in the twenty-seven years, beginning with 1847. and the 
 range of rates was from 1\ to 10 per cent. The monometalic gold 
 standard was adopted in 1816, and in the 122 years preceding that 
 event there were only sixteen changes, and the rate of interest 
 never fell below 4 nor rose above 6 per cent. The late Mr. Jevons, 
 an English writer and statistican of the highest authority, in his 
 volume on money predicted in 1875 that the sensitiveness of the 
 money market would increase under the present system of Eng- 
 land, and declared it probable that commercial crisis would, from 
 time to time, recur, even exceeding in their violence and disastrous 
 consequences those whose history we know too well. The pre- 
 diction has been abundantly fulfilled. Mr. Giffen, the " militant 
 
14 SOUND MONEY. 
 
 monometalist," says in an article in the Contemporary Review : 
 " The course of the money market since 1871, when the German 
 Government began to draw gold from London, has been full of 
 stringencies. The crises of 1873 and 1875 were, no doubt, precipi- 
 tated by them, and since 1876, in almost every year except 1879 
 and 1880, there has been a stringency of greater or less severity, 
 directly traceable to or aggravated by the extraordinary demands 
 for gold and the difficulty of supplying them." 
 
 Compare the Bank of England with the Bank of France. The 
 latter often has to help the former out of trouble, the case is never 
 vice versa. The one redeems in gold only ; the other in gold or 
 silver, at its own pleasure. ISio run is ever made on the Bank of 
 France. The Bank of England changes its rate of interest to pre- 
 vent runs, figuratively speaking, with every moon. 
 
 The reason of the stability of silver is, that it is the money of 
 the people of the world, current everywhere, within the reach of 
 poor and rich, in the pockets of the high and the low, never 
 hoarded, never vaulted, never hid out of sight. Of the fifteen hun- 
 dred and fifty millions of people in the world, twelve hundred 
 millions, or four-fifths, use silver alone, and only two hundred and 
 eighty millions use both gold and silver, the rest having no money 
 at all. How is it possible for a substance which is the only money 
 of twelve hundred millions of people, who never have enough 
 of it, ever to be variant and fickle in value ? A few nations 
 in Europe and a great English dependency in America may 
 demonetize silver wholly or partially, and thereby destroy or 
 diminish its value in their special localities, but in the rest of the 
 world it asserts its prerogative as money with the glad acclaim of 
 loyal millions. Even in Europe the quantity of silver in welcome 
 circulation is little short of that of gold, and in Shermanized and 
 Tory dominated America we have much of it of full-coin value 
 busiW at work among the people making a campaign of education 
 preparatory to 1896. 
 
 PRICES OF INDUSTRIAL PRODUCTS. 
 
 With all this history back of it, with twelve hundred millions of 
 the inhabitants of God's earth using silver alone at the high ratio of 
 
 15 to 1, and craving more than they can get of it ; with all Europe 
 short in metallic money and hankering wistfully for a largely 
 
SOUXD MONEY. 15 
 
 increased use of silver money, and with our own people indignant 
 at the fall in prices of all the products of industry in field, factory 
 and mines through the fraud of 1873, who can doubt that when- 
 ever the privilege of the American mints withheld now by Eng- 
 land shall be restored to silver, that metal will instantly leap to 
 parity with gold at the ratio of 16 to 1, and maintain it as steadily 
 as it did from 1686 to 1873 ? 
 
 It is easy to show that, even under the violently disturbing 
 measure of 1871-1873, bv which silver was reduced by England 
 in her two financial dependencies, Germany and the United 
 States, to a mere mercantile commodity, the value of silver has 
 been more steady than that of gold. Of course the comparison of 
 silver demonetized must not be with gold, which is the onlv mon- 
 etized metal, but must be with other substances of commerce, 
 which, like itself, has not the money function. 
 
 The tables of Mr. Augustus Sauerbeck, which are accepted as 
 reliable by all writers on the subject of prices, show that the ave- 
 rage yearly prices of forty-five leading commodities of commerce, 
 compared with their average prices in the period of 1867-1877, 
 had fallen by June, 1894, compared with gold, 37 per cent., which 
 is equivalent to saving that the purchasing power of gold had 
 increased as to the forty -five articles of trade, 55 per cent. More 
 particularly, if we select out of the forty-five articles alluded to, 
 the seven most largely bought and sold in the markets — to-wit : 
 wheat, corn, potatoes, rice, pig-iron, cotton and wool — the tables 
 of Sauerbeck show that during the twenty years, 1873 to 1893, 
 the average fall in the price of these staples in gold was 43 per 
 cent., which is equivalent to saying that an ounce of gold would 
 purchase 75 \ per cent, more of them in 1893 than it would in 1873. 
 Thus the value of gold fluctuated during the period of 1873 to 
 1893 as much as 55 per cent, in reference to forty-five articles, and 
 75J per cent, in respect to the seven most important of them. On 
 the other hand, these tables show that in comparison with these 
 articles of commerce silver fluctuated only 4 per cent., although 
 demonetized, losing that much in relative value. In short, in 1893, 
 gold bought 55 or lb\ per cent, more of the produce of man's 
 labor than in 1873, and silver 4 per cent. less. Secretary Morton 
 says that what Mr. Cleveland calls " sound money is that sort of 
 currency which has the most universal and least fluctuating pur- 
 
16 SOUND MONEY. 
 
 chasing power in the markets of all countries ; " is that which is 
 " the best and least fluctuating measure of value and medium of 
 exchange." Mr. A. J. Balfour adds an important ingredient to 
 Secretary Morton's definition — viz : " The money of the world 
 should be a fair and permanent record of obligations over long 
 periods of time." Tried by this true test, what becomes of Mr. 
 Morton's monometalic gold, and how pitiably does it compare in 
 steadiness of value with demonetized silver ? 
 
 THERE IS NO THREATENING OVERPRODUCTION OF SILVER. 
 
 It is very plain from what has been shown in the foregoing 
 paragraphs that unless there shall occur some extraordinary dimi- 
 nution in the production of gold and a simultaneous increase in 
 that of silver, nature's ratio of 15-16 to 1 must continue indefi- 
 nitely, and that silver remonetized, even by the United States 
 alone, would continue to maintain that steadiness of value which 
 had marked its history for centuries before its rash demonetization 
 in the United States without the authority of our people in 1873. 
 
 The monometallists accordingly claim, not that the gold pro- 
 duction is falling off, but that the silver production is increasing 
 in a degree that must compel a change of the standard ratio, at 
 the expense ot silver. In proof of this claim they refer to the 
 table on page fifty-two of the Mint Report for 1894, that table 
 showing the production of gold and silver in the years 1870 to 
 1892. It is useless to give the whole table here. Let three years 
 be taken. The production of gold and silver in the world during 
 the years to be named, stated in dollars' worth on the ratio of 15J 
 to 1, was as follows : 
 
 1870— Gold, $106,850,000; silver, $51,575,000. 
 1880— Gold, $106,500,000; silver, $96,700,000. 
 1892— Gold, $138,860,000 ; silver, $196,459,000. 
 
 In the whole period — 1870-'92 — of twenty-three years the pro- 
 duction of gold was $2,489,962,000, and that of silver, $2,524,964,- 
 000, the excess in the production of silver in the period having 
 been $35,002,000, or an average of a million and a half a year. 
 It is obvious that these figures fail to show a production of silver 
 threatening to nature's long-established ratio of 15-16 to 1. In 
 
SOUND MONEY. 17 
 
 1870, and for nine years following, there was an abnormal falling 
 off in the production of silver, while that of gold remained steady 
 and largely in excess of silver. Since 1880 there has been a 
 steady increase in the production of both metals, large of both, 
 but larger of silver than of gold. An increase in the production 
 of both metals cannot affect the ratio, unless the excess of one 
 over the other is extraordinarily great. As yet the greater increase 
 in the production of silver has not been sufficient to compensate 
 for the ten years of greater activity in gold. It would require a 
 continuation for as many as fifty or a hundred years of an exces- 
 sive production of silver over gold, to affect the ratio. For be it 
 kept in mind that the precious metals are not like the annual 
 crops of grain, cotton, and the like articles, consumed in their use, 
 but remain in permanent use for centuries and ages. The parlia- 
 mentary gold and silver commission of England estimated a few 
 years ago, that the gold and silver in the world in all forms and in 
 all hands was ten thousand millions of dollars' worth of silver and 
 eight thousand millions of dollars' worth of gold. What effect 
 upon this ocean of ten thousand millions of silver could the mil- 
 lion and a half of excess a year since 1870 produce upon the 
 ratio ? It is like emptying a coffee-pot into the sea. [Nature seems 
 to have provided in every period of years an excess of silver pro- 
 duction over that of gold to compensate the greater abrasion and 
 loss by casualty, the far greater waste, of the popularly-used metal 
 than that sustained by the carefully-vaulted metal of the bankers. 
 
 Nor is there any certainty that in the next ten years there will 
 be an excess in the silver production such as has marked the last 
 ten years. We may again witness an excess in the gold production 
 similar to that which occurred in the decade 1870-'80. It is not 
 for international conferences to divine conditions yet hidden in the 
 womb of the future. 
 
 As will have been seen, there was a very large gold production 
 in the decade 1870-1880, and a notably small silver production. 
 Yet, it was then that silver was demonetized by Germany and the 
 United States. There was no pretence that this was done because 
 silver was growing too plentiful ; the fear was as to gold. Silver 
 was demonetized to keep up the value of gold, by the contrivance 
 of England, Mr. Pierrepoint explains why. The production of 
 2;old has continued to increase through the decade 1880-1890; sil- 
 
18 SOUND MONEY. 
 
 ver production also experiencing a large increase, which was 
 abnormal, and is now abating. Nature in the two coming decades 
 will, most probably, bring back the wonted equilibrium; but God 
 grant that the production of both metals may continue large, as 
 one of the richest blessings He can bestow upon mankind. (See 
 the Note at the end of this essay.) 
 
 THIS REPUBLIC COMPETENT. 
 
 The reason alleged against independent action by the United 
 States in restoring to silver the privilege of the mints has been 
 the supposed importance of waiting for a ratio from an inter- 
 national conference. It has been shown that such an expectation 
 is illusory. Free coinage will have to wait, but not for the action 
 of a conference. The bimetalists of the United States, while 
 confident that the action of this countiw alone would restore silver 
 to fall parity the world over, have yet felt that it might be our 
 true policy to let the European nations (Germany especially) feel 
 the pinch of the shoe for awhile, and endure for a year or two 
 longer the curses of gold monometalism before any step on our 
 part be taken. The election of 1896 must intervene before the 
 policy of the United States can be determined, and there will be 
 a further interval of delay between this election and the instalment 
 of a new administration. 
 
 So far, therefore, as our own nation is concerned, the question 
 of when to remonetize settles itself. The galled jades must wince — 
 Germany and the States of the Latin Union — until contrition comes, 
 until they are fairly seated upon the stool of repentance for the 
 folly of 1871. Silver has its avenging Nemesis doing effective 
 work for it ; a goddess who is supposed to be especially severe 
 upon the proud and insolent ; of w T hom the possessors of unright- 
 eous wealth are the most conspicuous. The accumulation of hon- 
 est wealth invigorates the State ; it is honorable in motive and 
 wholly beneficial in result. The massing of dishonest wealth 
 undermines integrity, demoralizes enterprise, discourages right 
 methods, paralyzes healthy endeavor, and involves the producing 
 classes of society in discontent and unrest. Unrighteous wealth 
 is the upas-tree of modern civilization. It rotted and destroyed 
 the Roman Empire and civilization. 
 
 There is no room for any present dread of " silver monomet- 
 
SOUND MONEY. 19 
 
 alism," that pons asini of Mr. Cleveland. Silver monometalism 
 could only come from an unprecedented excess in the production 
 of the metal, for fifty years or more, concurrently with a meagre 
 production of gold. A great increase in the production of gold 
 and silver, both, would be an incalculable blessing to mankind, 
 and the monometalism of either would be the mere hoba;oblin of 
 the demagogue. 
 
 The manly masses of our people do not sympathize with the 
 monometalists in their deprecation of " over "-production. Noth- 
 ing but good can come to the better and worthier classes of soci- 
 ety from what is called the over-production of wheat and corn 
 and cotton and iron and coal and gold and silver. What mortal 
 man in all this world (not a monometalist) is afraid of PLEXTY ? 
 It is not plenty that makes trouble, paralyzes business, and pro- 
 duces hard times. Over-production is always a blessing to the 
 million. What pauperizes mankind is not the undue production, 
 but the wanton destruction of God's best gifts to His creatures. 
 When Providence, in its unbounded generosity to the human race, 
 increases her gift of a metal as precious to the millions as silver, 
 and the minions of mammon, in wanton and impious insolence, 
 make bold to intercept that gift from its intended beneficiaries, 
 REBUKE becomes the duty of the hour. It is the habit of the 
 American people to, administer rebuke at the polls to enemies of 
 the public welfare. They will do so in 1896. 
 
 [NOTE.] 
 LARGE YIELD OF GOLD. 
 
 Highest Production Reached in Twenty Years. 
 
 A Very Perceptible Falling Off in the Output of Silver — An Increase in 
 the Production of Gold Noticeable Throughout the "World. 
 
 The Director of the Mint, Mr. R. E. Preston, estimates the production of gold 
 by the mines of the United States, approximately, during the calendar year 1894, 
 to have been 1,910,800 fine ounces, of the coining value of 339,500,000, an increase 
 over 1893 of -53,500,000, which is the largest amount produced in any year since 
 1878. 
 
20 
 
 SOUND MONEY. 
 
 The production of silver from the mines of the United States is estimated to 
 have approximated in 1894, 49,500,000 ounces of the coining value of $64,000,000, 
 showing a decrease as compared with 1893 of 10,500,000 ounces. 
 
 In regard to the product of the world's gold and silver for 1894, the returns are 
 incomplete, but so far as received, show an increase in the production of gold 
 over 1893 of about 821,000,000, the largest increase being in Africa, viz : 89,600,- 
 000; Australia, 86,000,000; followed by the United States with an increase of 
 83,950,000. Australia leads the list of gold producing countries for 1894, with a 
 production of 841,000,000; the United States taking second place. 
 
 The production of silver in the world, it is estimated, will be from 145,000,000 
 to 150,000,000 ounces for the calendar year 1894. The heaviest falling off in the 
 production is in the United States, followed by Australia ; Mexico showing a gain 
 of 2,700,000 ounces. Mexico also gains in her production of gold 81,500,000. 
 
 PRODUCTION OF GOLD BY STATES. 
 
 The director estimates the production of gold by States and Territories during 
 the calendar year, 1894, as follows : 
 
 State. 
 
 Alaska 
 
 Arizona 
 
 California 
 
 Colorado 
 
 Georgia 
 
 Idaho 
 
 Michigan 
 
 Montana 
 
 Nevada 
 
 New Mexico. . . 
 North Carolina. 
 
 Oregon 
 
 South Carolina . 
 South Dakota. 
 
 Texas 
 
 Utah 
 
 "Washington .... 
 
 Alabama 
 
 Maryland 
 
 Tennessee . . 
 
 Virginia 
 
 Vermont 
 
 Wyoming 
 
 ine Ounces. 
 
 Value. 
 
 53,863 
 
 81,113,350 
 
 86,324 
 
 1,784,475 
 
 656,468 
 
 13,570,397 
 
 459,152 
 
 9,491,514 
 
 4,728 
 
 97,736 
 
 100,000 
 
 2,081,291 
 
 2,150 
 
 44,444 
 
 176,637 
 
 3,651,410 
 
 55,042 
 
 1,137,819 
 
 27,465 
 
 567,751 
 
 2,254 
 
 46,594 
 
 68,792 
 
 1,422,056 
 
 4,733 
 
 97,832 
 
 159,594 
 
 3,299,100 
 
 41,991 
 
 868,031 
 
 9,438 
 
 195,100 
 
 1,495 
 
 30,903 
 
 Total 1,910,813 
 
 839,500,00 
 
 AMOUNT OF SILVER PRODUCED. 
 
 The estimates of silver produced by the same States and Territories during the 
 calendar vear is as follows : 
 
SOUND MONEY. 21 
 
 Coining Value 
 
 Fine Ounces. Measured in Gold. 
 
 Alaska 22,261 828,728 
 
 Arizona 1,147,204 1,483,254 
 
 California 717,368 927,506 
 
 Colorado - 23,281,399 30,101,203 
 
 Georgia 325 420 
 
 Idaho ? 3,288,545 4,251,860 
 
 Michigan 35,122 45,410 
 
 Montana 12,820,0S1 16,575,458 
 
 Nevada 1,035,151 1,338,377 
 
 New Mexico 632,183 817,368 
 
 North Carolina 352 455 
 
 South Carolina 305 394 
 
 Oregon '. 26,171 33.S37 
 
 South Dakota 58,937 76,24S 
 
 Texas 429,314 555,073 
 
 Utah 5,891.901 7,617,812 
 
 Washington 113,160 146,308 
 
 Alabama 
 
 Maryland 
 
 Tennessee 
 Virginia . . 
 Vermont . 
 Wyoming 
 
 \ 
 
 182. 235 
 
 Total 49,500,000 864,000,000 
 
 TOTAL VALUE OF BOTH METALS. 
 
 The total value of the gold and silver produced by States and Territories during 
 
 the calendar vear is as follows : 
 
 Total Value 
 State. Gold and Silver. 
 
 Alaska $1,142,332 
 
 Arizona 3,267,729 
 
 California ' 14,497,903 
 
 Colorado 39,592,717 
 
 Georgia 98,156 
 
 Idaho 6,333,141 
 
 Michigan 89,854 
 
 Montana 20,226,S68 
 
 New Mexico 1,385,119 
 
 North Carolina 47,049 
 
 Oregon 1,455,893 
 
 South Carolina 98,233 
 
 South Dakota 3,375,348 
 
 Texas 555,073 
 
 Utah 8,485,843 
 
 Washington 341,408 
 
 Alabama, Maryland, Tennessee, Virginia, Vermont, Wyoming 31,138 
 
 Total §103,500,000 
 
The World-Wide Business Paralysis and its Cause, 
 
 ELECTIONS CANNOT CURE THE ILL, 
 
 IT IS GROWING IN INTENSITY, BREEDING SOCIAL 
 UNREST AND THREATENING SOCIETY. 
 
 [Note. — Mr. Barr Eobertson, one of the highest authorities on the subject, said 
 uncontradicted, at the meeting of the Royal Society of Arts in London, on Janu- 
 ary 19th, 1893, that "the transfer of wealth from the landed and propertied 
 classes, and from the mercantile, manufacturing and producing classes generally, 
 in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, to the holders of securities, 
 mortgages, annuities and the like, cannot be less than two thousand millions of 
 pounds sterling (ten thousand millions of dollars), due solely to the appreciation 
 of gold. Such a colossal increment as has accrued to the holders of securities, 
 valued in gold, during the last twenty years in Europe and the United States, 
 amounting to not less than seven thousand millions of pounds sterling ($35,000,- 
 000,000), is entirely unparallelled in the history of the world ; all other questions 
 sinking into utter insignificance compared with it."] 
 
 Norfolk, Va., November 18th, 1894. 
 
 To the Editor of the Norfolk Pilot : 
 
 In what follows I shall use freely of language not my own. 
 I shall employ that of some of the most conspicuous men of our 
 times. The severity of the existing depression in all business will, 
 in our country, under the influence of the recent elections, be 
 slightly modified, but it will not be relieved — it will continue 
 indefinitely. 
 
 BIMETALISM ALMOST UNIVERSALLY DESIRED. 
 
 Not only America, but all Europe is in trouble. Everyone 
 admits that the world stands on the edge of revolution, social and 
 political, but everyone shrinks from it. Neither north nor south, 
 east nor west, neither capitalist nor laborer, wishes to create caste 
 
SOUND MONEY. 23 
 
 or classes, or to spread misery, oppression or violence. We all 
 see danger before us. We all desire to avoid it. Our only dispute 
 is about the path. 
 
 To those who have had chiefly in mind the struggle between 
 silver and gold, that is the question which, for the moment, presses 
 hardest. The single gold standard seems to be working ruin with 
 a violence that nothing can stand. If its influence is to continue 
 for the future at the rate of its action during the twentv years 
 since the gold standard took possession of the world, some gene- 
 ration, not very remote, will see in the broad continent of Amer- 
 ica only a half dozen overgrown cities keeping guard over a mass 
 of capital, and lending it out to a population of dependent laborers 
 on the mortgage of their growing crops and unfinished handiwork. 
 Such sights have been common enough in the world's historv ; 
 but against it we all rebel. Rich and poor alike ; labor and capi- 
 tal ; railways, churches and colleges — all alike, and all in solid 
 good faith, shrink from such a future as that. 
 
 This agreement is the best part of the situation. Even on the 
 burning ground of silver and gold, we agree in principle. Xo 
 party and no party leader has ever approved of the single gold 
 standard. Xot one American in a hundred believes in it. We 
 are more unanimous in hostility to it than we are on any other 
 question in politics. A vast majority in all parties agree that the 
 single gold standard has been, is, and will be, a national disaster 
 of the worst kind. "What is still more strange, almost the whole 
 world sympathizes with us. Xine-tenths of mankind are hostile 
 to the single gold standard. Our 70,000,000 people are unanimous 
 against it. Most of the great European nations and their govern- 
 ments dislike it. South America rejects it. The whole of Asia 
 knows only silver, and India, which contains five-sixths of all the 
 subjects of the British crown, is as hostile to it as ourselves. Yet 
 the bankers of London have said that we must submit, and we 
 have submitted. • 
 
 So strange a spectacle has never been seen in our history. 
 Argument, and even the compulsive proof brought by world-wide 
 ruin, seems to be helpless against this astonishing power. "What 
 is the use of argument when we are all convinced, and when at 
 least nine-tenths of the civilized and uncivilized world agree ? 
 England holds us to the single sold standard, by the force of her 
 
24 SOUND MONEY. 
 
 capital alone, more despotically than she could hold us to her em- 
 pire in 1776. The mere threat of her displeasure paralyzes man- 
 kind. 
 
 The most instructive point of all is that our great majority con- 
 sists of the interests in the world which have been from time 
 immemorial reckoned as the safest and most conservative. 
 
 The whole agricultural class ; the whole class or classes of small 
 proprietors, the farmers that make the bulk and sinew of our race ; 
 the artisan whose interests are bound up in the success of our 
 manufactures; all these join hands with what is left of their old 
 enemies, the landed aristocracy of Europe, to protest against a 
 revolution made for the benefit of the money-lenders alone. 
 
 On the other hand, that revolution is more radical than any 
 which has been accomplished by professed revolutionists. Had all 
 the despotic governments that have existed in a thousand years 
 united their intelligence to set class against class, to breed corrup- 
 tion, to stimulate violence, and to shatter the foundations of society, 
 they could have invented no device more effective than this decree, 
 which at one stroke doubled the value of capital, destroyed the 
 value of industry, and swept the small proprietor everywhere into 
 bankruptcy. 
 
 The whole conservative force of the world protests against so 
 violent and despotic a change. AVe protest against it the more 
 because we know enough of politics to fear the reaction against 
 such extravagance. We see the risk to which the gold mania is 
 exposing us. We have reason to know the popular feeling, and 
 we do not believe that the single gold standard can be long main- 
 tained. We want real money — coin — carrying intrinsic value ; yet 
 if England succeeds in her obstinate effort to destroy the value of 
 silver for coinage, nothing can save us from paper. England may 
 well succeed; she seems already to be on the point of success 
 greater than her government wanted ; and in that case, irredeem- 
 able paper stares us squarely in the face. 
 
 THE SITUATION GROWS GRADUALLY, CONTINUOUSLY WORSE. 
 
 The great trouble of the times is not merely the depression of 
 prices, but their continuing, unceasing fall. This fall began with 
 wheat and cotton, in consequence of the fall of silver in connec- 
 
SOUND 3I0XEY. 25 
 
 tion with British India as explained in my former letter. The 
 demonetization of the white metal took immediate effect on agri- 
 culture, American agriculture chiefly, but agriculture in Europe 
 as well. This continued drop in prices has been consequent upon, 
 and is mainly due to the great monetary changes which resulted in 
 the abandonment of the bimetalic system, under which the entire 
 business of the world was carried on prior to 1873. In order to 
 arrest this continuous and progressive fall it is necessary to revert 
 to the system which prevailed up to 1873, under which the summit 
 of agricultural and industrial prosperity was reached and main- 
 tained not only in the United States but throughout Europe. 
 
 The most alarming feature is that already mentioned of its 
 being progressive, no one being able to foresee where it is to end. 
 If we could foresee, if we could be assured that prices had at last 
 touched bottom and that, low as they are now, prices would re- 
 main stable and steady in the future, then it might be possible to 
 conduct our agricultural and industrial operations on a business- 
 like and stable basis. Fresh arrangements could be made, a gen- 
 eral adjustment would take place in rent, in wages, in expenses 
 and in all outgoings, and business would go on as before. It would 
 be a terrible state of things and it would entail enormous suffer- 
 ing. The present generation of farmers and cultivators would 
 most of them be ruined and pass away; but still, if once you 
 could be certain that prices had touched bottom, why, then, after 
 a general readjustment, industry could go on and be prosecuted 
 in the future, always upon the condition that prices had reached 
 their lowest level and could be counted upon to remain steady in 
 the future. But that, unhappily, is not the case. 
 
 The fall of prices has been continuous now for many years, and 
 it is still progressing. In order to see this we have only to look at 
 the evideuce of what is known as the system of index numbers. 
 Many different tables of prices have been compiled in recent years 
 upon this system by a number of eminent men. The best known 
 of them are the tables of the Economist newspaper, of Dr. Soetbier, 
 of Mr. Giffen, of Dr. Sauerbeck, M. Palgrave and others, and 
 they all show very much the same result, namely : That the prices 
 of commodities generally have been steadily falling now for many 
 years. The latest table I have seen — that of Dr. Sauerbeck — shows 
 that from 1873 to 1893 the fall has been rather over 10 per cent., 
 
26 SOUND 310 KEY. 
 
 and it still continues in 1894. Take the case of one article alone, 
 of wheat, for instance. Xot many years a«;o, an agricultural asso- 
 ciation in England, alarmed at the continual fall of wheat, sent 
 over to the United States two highly intelligent commissioners to 
 report upon the prospects of the future price of that grain. 
 
 The two gentlemen went back and reported that there was no 
 likelihood of the price going below 40 shillings a quarter (eight 
 bushels) in the future, that being equivalent in our currency to 
 about $1.20 a bushel. The prediction has not been realized. 
 Wheat has been going down steadily ever since. In May last the 
 following was one of the commercial announcements : 
 
 " Messrs. Ralli Bros, sold recently red Kurrachee wheat, May 
 and June shipments, to Hull at 19s. 3d. per 492 pounds. This 
 was superior and would make fair average quality worth only 18s. 
 6cl. Similar quality three years ago would be worth 38 and 39s. 
 a quarter. Mneteen shillings three pence is the lowest price 
 Messrs. Ralli Bros, have ever sold wheat at." This is equivalent 
 to about 53 cents a bushel, and the fall still continues. 
 
 THE DISEASE OF PRICES IS NOT OVERPRODUCTION. 
 
 Some wise men ascribe this continual fall to overproduction, 
 insisting that there is no mystery about the fall at all ; that the 
 thing is very simple ; that vast areas of fertile and virgin soil are 
 cultivated now in all parts of the world which formerly grew 
 nothing ; that there are more railways, cheaper freights, and 
 greater facilities of transport everywhere ; and that all that we are 
 suffering from ma} T be summed up in the word, " overproduction." 
 When people talk of overproduction, they always seem to forget 
 that pari passu with the increase of commodities there has been 
 an enormous increase also in the. population, and in the needs and 
 requirements of the world. If they mean by overproduction that 
 the ratio of the increase of commodities has been out of all pro- 
 portion to the increased requirements of the world, why, then, I 
 do not believe them. And certainly no one has ever given the 
 smallest proof of that very common, but that very loose and vague 
 assertion. 
 
 Have we ever considered what the increase of the population of 
 the world is supposed to be every twenty years ? I saw an estimate 
 
SOUND MONEY. 27 
 
 upon this point the other day. According to that estimate the 
 increase in the population of the world every twenty years amounted 
 to no less than 200,000,000 people, and rather more; 10,000,000 a 
 year. Xow, just consider what that means. The whole popula- 
 tion of England is only about 30,000,000, and therefore it is much 
 the same as if some six or seven new Englands had been added to 
 the world in the last twenty years. And, if they had been, what 
 sort of increase in commodities would be wanted to supply them ? 
 But. in connection with this subject, the tables of wheat statis- 
 tics show the total yield of the world's wheat crop for 1891, 1892 
 and 1893 to have been 304,000,000 quarters for 1891, 300,000,000 
 for 1892 and 288,000,000 for 1893, showing a steady decrease in 
 production. What the English call a quarter of grain is equal to 
 about eight bushels. The Liverpool prices, on the other hand, 
 were 41s. per quarter for 1891, 29s. for 1892, and 25s. for 1893, 
 showing an enormous fall in prices. So here we have a fall in 
 price of 40 per cent, in wheat, in spite of a decrease of production 
 and in spite of a large increase in population and demand. In the 
 face of figures such as these, it is idle to talk of the fall in prices 
 being due to nothing but overproduction. Xo, the more we sift, 
 and the more closely we examine into this question, we will find 
 that there is only one thing which is able to sufficiently account 
 for the enormous and unprecedented change which has occurred 
 in prices during the last twenty years ; and that is the change 
 which has occurred, not in production nor in commodities, but in 
 the value of money itself; entirely due to the ojeat monetary 
 revolution which occurred some twentv vears as;o in our country 
 and upon the continent of Europe, and to the abandonment of the 
 bimetallic system by which it was accompanied at that time. 
 
 THERE IS NO GOLD TO TAKE THE # PLACE OF THE DISCARDED SILVER. 
 
 While silver depreciates under the influences that I have abun- 
 dantly described, drao-^ino; wheat and cotton down with it, and 
 thereby cheapening correspondingly all material property, there 
 is no hope of any check to this continual fall of prices from any 
 probable increase in the quantity of gold in use in the form of 
 money coins. One of the ablest and most trusted statisticians of 
 the present day is Professor Edward Suess. of the University of 
 Vienna, who has made an exhaustive examination of the facts of 
 
28 SOUND MONEY. 
 
 the production of silver and gold in the world, and of the con- 
 sumption of these metals. He concurs with Dr. Soetbier, an 
 equally distinguished scientist, in saying that the consumption of 
 gold for plate, ornaments and use in the arts, is now about equal 
 to the annual production, with a prospect of becoming greater, 
 and that there cannot be any increase hereafter in the amount of 
 coined gold to keep pace with the world's growth in population 
 and trade ; remarking : " We have already reached the day, or 
 approached very close to it, when mining will yield less than indus- 
 try consumes. 
 
 " From that day forward the whole new production no longer 
 counts for monetary needs, and from that day forward industry 
 will withdraw from the stock of money an amount of gold increas- 
 ing annually with the increase of well-being." In another place, 
 repeating a declaration made in 1877, he says that " the production 
 of gold will diminish permanently and in extraordinary degree ; 
 and that to-day, even more distinctly than at that time, events are 
 showing that this metal, with constantly increasing rarity, will no 
 longer be able to maintain its past economic position." I myself 
 add the corollary. Either the circulating medium of the world 
 must chiefly consist of fiat paper, pure and simple, or it must be 
 silver. 
 
 MONOMETALISM AN INVENTION AND INNOVATION OF THE LAST 
 
 TWENTY-FIVE YEARS. 
 
 ]STo fact in economics can be more obvious than the necessity of 
 a return to the policy of bimetalism. There are a good many 
 well-meaning people of the present day who believe that bimetal- 
 ism is something new; but it is as old as the history of mankind. 
 Gold and silver have formed the joint money of the world since 
 the earliest ages of man ; and did not even partially cease, that is 
 to say, did not cease in even Europe and the United States, until 
 twenty years ago. 
 
 What is bimetalism ? In the United States no other power 
 than the federal government can declare what, money is, and by so 
 doing, make that money legal tender for the payment of debts 
 between man and man. Generally, the government declares 
 nothing but gold and silver coins, accurately described, to be legal 
 
SOUND MONEY. 29 
 
 tender money. In rare emergencies it resorts to be expedient of 
 declaring its own treasury notes — greenbacks — to be legal tender, 
 but this is seldom done. Gold and silver coins are in general the 
 only legal tender money. It is not all such coins, however, that 
 are made legal tender. 
 
 The government imparts this function only to coins struck at its 
 mints. A private citizen may manufacture a gold or a silver coin 
 precisely like that issued from the mints in weight and fineness ; 
 and yet that coin would not be money ; it would be only merchan- 
 dize, and would bring in the market only what the same weight of 
 metal is worth there. 
 
 These coins of the mint, therefore, have an attribute imparted 
 to them by law, varying them from the material of which they are 
 composed. That is to say, they have the legal tender attribute ; 
 it is the fiat of the law which gives them a value different from 
 that which the metal of which they are composed possesses. This 
 difference is generally very small, the intrinsic or market value of 
 the metal in the silver and gold coins being very nearly the same 
 as its money value. Of late, however, since Great Britiain suc- 
 ceeded in procuring the demonetization of silver in this country, 
 and thereby bringing about a heavy depreciation of that metal in 
 Europe and the United States, silver as a commodity is worth 
 much less than our legal silver coins. The fiat of law makes the 
 American dollar worth 100 cents, while the cunning of John Bull 
 has made the same quantity of metal worth but little over half the 
 money value. 
 
 Mr. Bull's first success was very signal. Our mint act of 1873, 
 whose passage he secured, demonetized not only silver bullion by 
 denying to it the privilege of the mints; but reduced our silver 
 coins to bullion value by providing that those for less than a dollar 
 should not be legal tender for greater payments than $5 ; and by 
 actually divesting the dollar coins of power to pay any debts what- 
 ever. Five years afterwards, however, the Bland act managed to 
 get through Congress, by which the American dollar, the silver 
 dollar of our own mints, was re-invested with the le^al tender 
 function. 
 
 WHAT BIMETALISM IS AND WAS. 
 
 So much for our silver coins already minted and most of them 
 
30 SOUXD MONEY. 
 
 in circulation. Nevertheless, silver itself is still demonetized in 
 the United States. The law of the land so provides, that if gold 
 is taken to our mints they are bound to receive it from any person 
 whatever in any quantity, and to return it to the owner coined at 
 the rate of 25 8-10 grains to the dollar free of charge. The result 
 is practically all the gold of the country, not used in the arts, is 
 converted into money coins having the legal tender function. 
 Another effect is to make all gold in the country, whether coined 
 or not, worth its money value. 
 
 The case was the same in regard to silver until twenty years 
 ago. Everv and any owner of the metal could take it to one of 
 the Federal mints and it would be coined at the rate of 41 2 1 grains 
 tu the dollar and returned to the owner in the form of coins with- 
 out charge. The operation of this law was to make all silver in 
 the country worth its coin value. Until this privilege of the mints 
 was denied to silver, our laws of coinage and legal tender held 
 gold and silver to an exact unvarying parity of value, at the ratio 
 of 412^ to 25 8-10, or 16 to 1. These laws giving equality of privi- 
 lege in the mints to the two metals had existed here since our 
 government was formed, and in Europe for a hundred, nay for 
 hundreds of years, holding gold and silver to the legal tender 
 parity of 16 to 1 in this country, \b\ to 1 in Europe, and 15 to 1 
 in Asia; with so little variation as to be inappreciable, always 
 more in favor of silver than of gold. There was never complaint 
 of any serious variations of either metal from these relative values. 
 Under the influence of mintage and coinage laws the parity was 
 maintained automatically in three continents. There was never 
 complaint, and the unfailing steadiness of this parity was one of 
 the greatest blessings to the world ever resulting from the wisdom 
 and honesty of man. 
 
 Since 1873, alas, all this has been changed. Silver has been 
 boycotted; the mints of the government have been closed to it; 
 it has been steadily and continually going down in value, dragging 
 down with it the prices of all sorts of material property. Bimetal- 
 ism was discarded. Monometalism was enthroned — the Iliad of 
 incalculable woes to mankind. 
 
 INSANITY OF THE FEAR OF TOO MUCH SILVER. 
 
 There is but one remedy for the universal troubles, mercantile 
 
Sound money, 31 
 
 and financial. It consists in a return to the policy of centuries 
 anterior to the accursed year 1873 — in a return to bimetalism. 
 I shall now consider the stock objections, the sterotyped pre- 
 tenses that are urged against this return. It is insisted that the 
 
 CD CD 
 
 amount of silver annually produced is so great as to render its 
 appreciation to its former value impossible, even under mintage, 
 coinage and legal tender laws passed for that object. 
 
 Well, the production is about 8175,000,000 worth a year at par 
 estimation. The production of gold is about $165,000,000 worth. 
 We have already seen that the stock of s^old mouev in the world 
 
 */ CD l 
 
 in the form of coins cannot be expected to increase hereafter. So 
 that the only possible increase in the metalic money stock must 
 hereafter come from silver, for a number of years the silver pro- 
 duction per annum has been materially increased ; but not incom- 
 mensurately with the increasing wants of the growing population, 
 trade and wealth of nations. The consumption annually of this 
 product in ornaments and in the arts has, like that of gold, in- 
 creased in greater proportion than that of production, and the sur- 
 plus left for monev is not lar^e enough to frighten the most timid 
 
 L %J »_ CD CD 
 
 economist ; is not large enough, if silver were remonetized, to 
 produce money enough for general use. The production might 
 increase beyond all past experience, and still the increase be neces- 
 sarv to the arrowing needs of mankind. 
 
 %> CD O 
 
 But the real question, the over-ruling factor in the case, is not 
 what is the annual production of this metal or of the two precious 
 metals, but what is the total mass of each of them already in exis- 
 tence ? The celebrated report to the British Parliament of the 
 gold and silver commission which was appointed by that body a 
 few years ago, gave us valuable information on that subject. 
 There the estimate of the mass of gold in existence in the world, 
 five years ago, was 87,750,000,000, or in round numbers, 88,000,- 
 000,000 — eight thousand millions of dollars' worth. Silver, on 
 the other hand, was estimated at a little under 810,000,000,000— 
 ten thousand millions of dollars' worth. Suppose, therefore, that 
 the silver product not annually consumed in the arts and in plate 
 and ornaments were as much as 875,000,000 a year. What is sev- 
 enty-five in ten thousand ? It is only three-quarters of 1 per cent., 
 and it is a very big coward who would be scared at such an incre- 
 ment. 
 
32 SOUND 3I0XEY. 
 
 The money metals are chosen as such because of their quality 
 of indestructibility from rust and minimum loss from abrasion. 
 They do not perish and are not annually consumed. A crop ot 
 wheat is consumed every year. A great increase or decrease in 
 the annual crop of any cereal makes a question of plenty or famine. 
 But the mass of gold and silver is the accumulation of centuries. 
 Some of the gold now in use, however often it may have been re- 
 coined, existed probably in the days of Solomon or even the Pha- 
 raohs, and the annual additions to the enormous mass are com- 
 paratively unimportant. The greater the increase of both metals 
 the better. Let the fellows that dread a plethora of silver go to 
 bed, cover up their heads, and the imaginary ghost will pass them 
 by, blessing instead of harming them in their dreams. 
 
 A CHANGE OF THE RATIO IMPRACTICABLE AND USELESS. 
 
 Another imaginary trouble is in fixing upon the ratio of the 
 two metals. Men who have been good bimetalists, but have been 
 hypnotized by the monied Octopus, insist upon an international 
 agreement on the question of the ratio. The demand is a pretense. 
 There cannot be any change of the old ratio. All the silver coins 
 in the United States, Europe, and the greater part of Asia, have 
 been coined on. that ratio; and a change would require the recoin- 
 age of possibly a thousand millions of dollars' worth of existing 
 silver coins. The task would be as useless as it would be costly, 
 if practicable. It is not to be thought of. If practicable, it would 
 be inexpedient. The American gold dollar is already too small. 
 All of those which go to Europe are melted down and recoined 
 into European mone}'. Even our quarter eagles are already too 
 small. They are easily confounded in the dark with ten-cent sil- 
 ver pieces. On the other hand, the silver dollar is full large 
 enough already. So is the silver half-dollar and quarter-dollar. 
 Any increase of size in our principal silver coins would make 
 them too large ; they must remain as they are. 
 
 I^o, the ratio must remain unaltered. Each nation must let the 
 laws affecting it stand as they are, and as they have stood practi- 
 cally for centuries. If the United States, in re-monetizing silver, 
 so determine, the other nations will be obliged to follow suit ; 
 France will do so with cheerful alacrity ; and these two powers 
 
SOUND MONEY. 33 
 
 control the question. The difficulty of fixing a ratio is imaginary. 
 Let it be relegated to the limbo of false clamors. 
 
 THE TERRORS OF A PURELY IMAGINARY DUMPING. 
 
 Finally, there comes the " dumping" objection, but the " dump- 
 ers " are a rather silly lot. The course of the silver stream is this : 
 It rises in America, flows through Europe, and debouches into the 
 ocean of Asiatic populations. Nothing flows up stream, and the 
 current of silver is not an exception to the general rule. 
 
 In America, where it is produced, the ratio of silver to gold is 
 16 to 1 5 that is to say, it takes sixteen times its weight in silver to 
 be equal here to a dollar of gold. In Europe it takes only 15| times 
 that weight. In India it takes still less, only 15 times as much. 
 There is no natural tendency, therefore, of silver to flow either 
 from Europe or India hitherward, and to dump itself here. The 
 mathematics of the dumping apprehension is very bad. 
 
 The silver of Europe, as before indicated, is coined on the ratio 
 of 15 J to 1 ; whereas American coinage is on the ratio of 16 to 1 ; 
 and as the bulk of European silver has been in use a great many 
 years, it has probably lost an average of 3 per cent, by abrasion. 
 Here is a dead loss of 6 per cent, on every dollar's worth of Euro- 
 pean silver if clumped in this country, to which must be added 
 freight and insurance. But this is not all that is to be said. The 
 European coins could not be offered to our mints. The one-tenth 
 alloy which they contain would have to be extracted — a loss of 10 
 per cent. — and the extraction would cost another 5 per cent., mak- 
 ing a loss and cost of not less than 22 cents before the dump could 
 reach our mints, the total loss on every dollar's worth of European 
 silver brought over here being not less than 32 cents. Foreign 
 Speculators would have to sell for 68 cents the silver which cost 
 them in Europe a dollar in gold. 
 
 In India the ratio is 15 to 1, and an ounce of silver there is 
 equal to 1 37-100 in gold ; so that a dollar there would contain 
 348^ grains of pure silver, against 359 91-100 grains in Europe, 
 and 371| grains of pure silver in the American dollar of 412J 
 grains of alloyed metal. Hence, to send silver from India here 
 would cause a loss of 8 cents an ounce. The dumping fright is 
 
34 SOUND M ONE Y. 
 
 therefore over a bug-a-boo ; and the whole enquiry is as idle as it 
 would be to consider what would happen if rain should fall from 
 the earth to the skies, or if the James river should reverse its 
 course and flow up to Glasgow. 
 
 I have said enough to show that a return to the policy of bi- 
 metalism is inevitable, The only question is, when will the return 
 take place ? Shall it be deferred, as M. Cernuschi believes it will 
 be, until after a general cateclysm in prices and property; until 
 the masses of mankind are reduced to pauperism ; until civil revo- 
 lution is muttering its thunders all around the horizon; until 
 socialism takes root in every community; until anarchism has 
 recruited an army, unfurled its flag and planted its assassins in 
 every capital city of the civilized world ; or shall the effective 
 remedy be applied before such calamities have fallen upon the 
 nations of the earth ? That is the present form of the question of 
 bimetal ism. 
 
 The United States, acting alone, can give relief to the world by 
 re-establishing the financial policy of the fathers, and undoing the 
 detestable fraud of 1873. Ho ! for the blessed year 1896. 
 
The Disfranchisement of the Money of the People, 
 
 Norfolk, Va., December 2d, 1891. 
 
 To the Editor of the Norfolk Pilot : 
 
 The currency platforms of the two great political parties of 
 the country in 1892 were substantially the same. Both were bad 
 enough, but the Democratic was worse than the other. They were 
 deceptive. The conventions which adopted them were honest, but 
 were victims, not authors, of the deception. 
 
 The fundholders of Lombard Street, through the Tories of Wall 
 Street, devised these platforms. That of the Democrats was this : 
 " We hold to the use of both gold and silver as the standard 
 money of the country, and to the coinage of both gold and silver 
 without discriminating against either metal, or charge for min- 
 tage." This was the true American part of the plank. 
 
 To it was appended this Tory clause : " But the dollar unit of 
 coinage of both metals must be of equal intrinsic and exchangea- 
 ble value, or be adjusted through international agreement, or by 
 such safeguards of legislation as shall insure the maintenance of 
 the parity of the two metals," etc., etc. 
 
 In the vulgar parlance of present times, we have a recently 
 adopted word, faque, which means some mountebank trick, artful 
 dodge or false pretense. The Tory clause of the party platforms 
 contains two faques. The first is this : The clause makes the res- 
 olution read substantially : " We demand the free and equal coin- 
 age of gold and silver in our mints free of charge, provided that 
 Great Britain gives us leave to do so in the form of an interna- 
 tional agreement to which she shall be a party." And Great Brit- 
 ain is predetermined not to give us leave. 
 
 There can be no international agreements without international 
 conference. So that, first, you must get a conference ; and then 
 you must get an agreement. Mr. Harrison tried the expedient of 
 a conference. Great Britain allowed him to call it. She took 
 
36 SOUND MONEY. 
 
 good care to be at Brussels in 1893 with her delegates. Whoever 
 will take the trouble to read the proceedings of that body will be 
 able to arrive at but one conclusion ; which is, that it was Great 
 Britain who broke up the conference at Brussels. That opinion 
 is confirmed by what has since happened. Germany was supposed 
 to be the greatest obstacle; but the popular opinion of Germany 
 is now strongly in favor of bimetalism. Count Caprivi was re- 
 proached in the German parliament last December for the conduct 
 of the German delegates at Brussels. What was his reply ? He 
 said that " the government, seeing that the conference was doomed 
 to failure had been unwilling to entangle German} 7 in a fiasco." 
 And why was it doomed to failure ? He went on to say, " With- 
 out Great Britain, nothing could be done, and under the present 
 prime minister (Gladstone) there was no chance of anj'thing being 
 attempted." 
 
 Since then, during the present year, Germany has appointed a 
 commission of her own. France is now, as she has always been, 
 bimetalic ; and President Cleveland has asked and has obtained 
 from Congress general powers to summon another international 
 conference whenever he pleases. He, however, has never yet ex- 
 ercised these powers; being interdicted by the Tories of Wall 
 street, at the command of England ; who is the great impediment 
 to a glad return of the nations to the bimetalic policy. 
 
 Great Britain contrived to have inserted in the national platform 
 of both our great political parties, in 1892, a clause practically 
 requiring her consent to the free coinage of both the precious 
 metals in our mints. And that is the situation. That is the 
 "condition which confronts" Mr. Cleveland. He must account 
 in his coming message for his failure, obediently to the behest of 
 his party, for nearly two } r ears, to call an international conference ; 
 and if he is candid with the country, he will say that his reason is 
 the same as that of Germany; that England, by her diplomacy, 
 interdicts it. He ought to proclaim that the time has come for 
 another " Declaration of Independence; " but I have no hope that 
 he will do so. The same malign influences which inserted the 
 Tory clause in the Democratic and Republican platforms of 1892 
 dictated the nominations of Harrison and Cleveland; and they 
 were sure of their man, whichever one might be elected. Are we 
 a free people ? Echo answers, free people ? Free people ! ! ! 
 
SOUND MONEY. 37 
 
 In refreshing contrast with the tory clause in the party platforms 
 which I have given, I insert an utterance having the true Ameri- 
 can ring. It is the leading resolution of the American Bimetalic 
 League, just adjourned at St. Louis : 
 
 " Whereas it is an indisputable fact, that the monetary revolution inaugurated 
 in 1873, by changing the money standard from gold and silver to gold alone, has 
 resulted, in twenty years, in doubling the value of money and reducing the gene- 
 ral level of prices 50 per cent. ; therefore this conference calls upon the advocates 
 of monetary reform everywhere to make monetary reform the paramount issue, 
 and to vote for no candidate who is not in favor of the free coinage of both gold 
 and silver at the ratio of 16 to 1, as it existed in this country from the foundation 
 of the government, and for indefinite ages throughout the civilized world until 
 1873. Americans must act for America, independently of what other nations 
 may do or may not do." 
 
 For one, I agree with the American bimetalic league. For one, 
 speaking, I trust, in the spirit of an American patriot, I declare 
 that I would rather have free coinage in our American mints 
 without the permission of Great Britian than with it ; without 
 international agreement than with it. 
 
 The other faque in the Tory clause of the party platforms is 
 this : The parity of the white metal with the gold was destroyed 
 by denying to it the privilege of the mints; and the metal, as 
 metal, cannot regain that parity until the privilege of the mints is 
 restored to it. Lombard and Wall streets well knew this fact; 
 and yet they made both of our great political parties put the cart 
 before the horse, and demand that the privilege of the mints 
 should not be restored to the silver metal until it had beforehand 
 regained its parity with gold, the bankers' money, which alone 
 enjoyed it. The faque is transparent. 
 
 Distinguished and trusted statisticians show that the debts of 
 the civilized world, public and private, aggregate in amount 
 betweeen one hundred thousand, and one hundred and fifty thous- 
 and millions of dollars. It requires the use of all the gold and 
 silver in the world available for money so to manipulate these 
 debts of mankind as to make them an easy burden to the popula- 
 tions on which they rest. 
 
 Gold and silver are made available for this benign and necessary 
 purpose by two expedients ; namely, by legal tender laws, and by 
 being officially coined at a parity fixed by coinage laws. Neither 
 
38 SOUND MONEY. 
 
 metal can perform the functions of money unless made legal ten- 
 der, and unless fixed in relative parity by official coinage, in 
 conformity with well-digested coinage laws. 
 
 If either metal is deprived of the privilege of official coinage, 
 it ceases to be money, and at once loses its parity with other metal. 
 But restore that parity, and such is the need for it as a means 
 of manipulating the vast, innumerable, and multiform debts of 
 mankind, that it immediately leaps to parity, and retains it, as 
 before 1878, fixed unchangeably. 
 
 I will stop here, for a moment, to consider why, until 1873, silver 
 always maintained, and often more than maintained, its parity 
 with gold. 
 
 An old stock argument is this : " You cannot retain a fixed 
 ratio between gold and silver any more than you can between any 
 other two commodities. You cannot interfere with the laws of 
 supply and demand. The thing is impracticable." This is abso- 
 lutely true ; but those who so insist appear to be ignorant of what 
 is perhaps the most elementary fact of our contention, viz : that 
 the bimetalic theory affords the most perfect and most striking 
 instance of the operation of this law; and I believe I am right in 
 saying that that is the opinion of every protessional teacher of 
 political economy in England at the present time, who are all 
 bimetalists. What we say is this, that the law can enact that either 
 or both of the metals shall be legal tender for debt. That we 
 know, because it has been done effectually for ages. And thereby 
 the law creates what is and what has been the chief demand for 
 the precious metals, namely, for the purposes of mone3 T . The law 
 can also enact that they shall be legal tender at a given ratio be- 
 tween the two ; for this, also, has been done, and done effectively, 
 in all the past. ~Now comes the question, how is the ratio main- 
 tained ? The answer is, that debtors always try to pay their debts 
 in the cheapest way they can ; that is to say, in whichever metal 
 is cheapest. What do these debts amount to ? I have already 
 said that the aggregate amount of the debts of the world is esti- 
 mated at something between one hundred, and one hundred and 
 fifty, thousand millions of dollars. Consequently, if either metal 
 falls, for any reason, below the legal ratio, there will be an imme- 
 diate increase in the demand upon it for the purpose of the pay- 
 ment of debts. The increased demand produces its natural effect. 
 
SOUND 31 ONE Y. 39 
 
 The metal which has shown the tendency to fall, returns under 
 the demand to the normal, or rather, I should say, the legal level. 
 Formerly it was gold (at the time of the gold discoveries forty 
 years ago). More recently it has been silver, the production of 
 which of late has much increased, although in nothing like the 
 same proportion as the production of gold increased in former 
 days. 
 
 And in this way an automatic action is set up, which not only 
 keeps the relative value of the metals steady, but makes it impos- 
 sible for them to vary, except within the smallest limits. If a 
 great increase in either metal should occur and begin to have the 
 least effect, the parity is immediately restored by the operation of 
 the natural law. And this explains at once the practical stability 
 of the ratio during the long periods antecedent to 1873, when the 
 variation in the production of the metals was infinitely greater 
 than it has ever been since then. I feel that I ought to apologize 
 for repeating this fundamental argument in replying to the anti- 
 quated objections with which we are assailed. 
 
 But the wholesome operation of this great law of supply and de- 
 mand loses its power to maintain the equilibrium described, when 
 either of the metals is denied the free use of the mints, the unre- 
 stricted benefit of legal tender laws, and the impartial use of them 
 by government, in public receipts and disbursements. All this is so 
 plain that one distinguished economic writer has said that none 
 but dunces will stickle for intrinsic value in the money metals, 
 except rascals. 
 
 Free coinage of both metals is therefore essential to the restora- 
 tion of this parity : and the best way of restoring free coinage to 
 silver, is to restore it. 
 
 Some half a century ago or less, after there had been a long 
 suspension of specie payments, the country resolved to decree a 
 general resumption by the treasury and the banks. There at once 
 arose a wild babel of advice in regard to silver reserves, gold re- 
 serves, how the swollen volume of floating notes should be cor- 
 ralled, and how the hysterical banks should escape the gorgons, 
 hydras and chimeras dire, which they saw infesting the path of 
 resumption. At last a doughty old man by the name of Horace 
 Greely, who professed to know nothing about finance, and who had 
 become wearied with the palaver of bankers, wise and otherwise, 
 
40 SOUND MONEY. 
 
 astounded the clamoring tribe and comforted the country, one 
 morning, by proclaiming that " the best way of resuming specie 
 payments was to resume." His advice was adopted. "Resumption 
 immediately took place. Resumption was accomplished, despite 
 of the bankers and to the dismay of the faquers — by resuming. 
 
 Important as that question was, it sinks into insignificance in 
 comparison with the question of restoring to silver metal the priv- 
 ilege of the mints, and allowing it to perform its God-given func- 
 tion of rendering easy and facile to mankind the burden of the 
 debts amounting to a hundred thousand millions of dollars which 
 rest upon their stalwart shoulders. Xot to restore this privilege 
 to this metal is to commit a fearful crime against humanity. 
 
 Mr. Cleveland will doubtless say a good deal about a debased 
 currency, in reference to our silver coins. In America we are 
 totally unfamiliar with base coins. The laws allow any man who 
 has coins that have become worn and light of weight to return 
 them to the mint and to receive their nominal equivalent in new, 
 full-weight coins in exchange. This privilege was unknown in 
 England in former times ; and that country was full of abraded 
 coins (chiefly silver, because they were the money of the popu- 
 lace) to such an extent that a " slick shilling " was a term of abom- 
 ination. The worn coins became a public curse, and Macauley 
 graphically describes the evil of them in one of his essays. But 
 such coins are unknown in our country. No others have circula- 
 tion amongst us than those struck bv our mints, and these coins 
 are worth full par by the legal tender and coinage laws of our 
 country. Therefore, to reprobate these coins as base is to denounce 
 the law of the land as sanctioning a fraud ; and such denunciation 
 would not be entirely becoming in the chief executor of those 
 laws. 
 
 But if the metal in our silver coins is not worth, as metal in the 
 market, the value which the law of the land gives it in the form 
 of coins, everyone knows that this result has been superinduced 
 by the grossest fraud ever perpetrated since gold and silver coins, 
 stricken by national mints, became the money of civilized nations. 
 
 In all our ante-'73 history, silver not only held its parity with 
 gold at 16 to 1, but was always more or less above par, in conse- 
 quence of its being the favorite money of the people, much more 
 largely and continually used in transactions between man and man, 
 
SOUND MONEY. 41 
 
 than gold, the money of bankers and of their vaults. It was the 
 fraud of 1873 that depreciated silver, and it is the perpetrators of 
 that fraud sent over from Lombard Street, and their American 
 leash hounds, that are now in hue and cry after the American dol- 
 lar as a "base coin." 
 
 There can be no doubt of the fact that the great body of the 
 voters of the Democratic party are bimetalic. There is just as 
 little doubt that Mr. Cleveland is violentlv monometalic. His 
 policy against silver has been extreme. He forced the repeal of 
 the Sherman act, by which repeal the treasury was required to 
 suspend its purchase and coinage of the surplus silver of our mines 
 to the amount of §54,000,000 a year, and issuing for it the same 
 amount of greenbacks; thus painfully restricting the currency. 
 
 His policy of borrowing gold on new issues of government 
 bonds, for the purpose of paying maturing paper obligations of 
 the government in that metal, rather than in silver, is in the same 
 line. His fad is to maintain inviolate a gold reserve of a hundred 
 millions of dollars. He has erected his reserve into a juggernaut 
 before which all other interests must bend obeisance, and under 
 whose remorseless wheels every opposing interest must be crushed. 
 
 The law, and the tenor of the bonds, make these obligations of 
 the government payable in coin, but silver coins are ignored and 
 degraded, and gold coins only employed in the payments. It is 
 an ominous sign that John Sherman is in daily conference with 
 Mr. Cleveland about the forthcoming message. 
 
 The result is: Mr. Cleveland will have to recommend in that 
 paper the withdrawal and final destruction of the entire greenback 
 circulation of the country, now amounting to §346,000,000. They 
 are payable in coin, and although they are the most popular money 
 ever enjoyed by the people of the United States, and are never, by 
 the people, presented for redemption, yet in the hands of the 
 bankers they are a perpetual menace to the hundred million gold 
 reserve, our monometalic Juggernaut, and must therefore be re- 
 tired. 
 
 Obliged to make this recommendation, it must follow that Mr. 
 Cleveland must recommend the substitution of bank notes in the 
 place of the greenbacks, and suggest some such scheme of banking 
 as the Octopus blocked out in Baltimore the other day. Govern- 
 
42 SOUND MONEY. 
 
 merit bonds will be the basis of. the new bank circulation, and, as 
 a sop to Cerberus, it will be recommended that a certain percen- 
 tage of the silver coins shall constitute a part of the reserves of 
 the banks issuing the new currency. Another sop will be the 
 repeal of the ten per cent. tax. Under this system, it will make, 
 not the government the regulator of the amount of money to be 
 circulated in the United States, but the banks, and we shall have 
 a continual succession of plethoras and stringencies in the money 
 market, until a second Andrew Jackson shall rise in the land, and 
 declare that the people shall be masters, not slaves, of the money 
 gods. 
 
 I shall discuss the new policy of selling bonds to get gold in full 
 detail at some future time. The saddest feature in the whole mat- 
 ter of the demonetization of silver in the United States, and in the 
 movement for the restoration of it to the full functions of a money 
 metal, is the fact that among the statesmen holding exalted posi- 
 tions of trust, responsibility and power in our government, there 
 are a few, and not few enough "incorruptible " millionaires recently 
 and suddenly millionaired ; and that there are others, many or 
 few, who are candidates for the manipulation. 
 
India and the United States. 
 
 THE RUPEE— SOME CONSEQUENCES OF OUR DEMON- 
 ETIZATION ACT— THE HAWAIIAN QUESTION. 
 
 Norfolk, Va., November 3d, 1894. 
 
 To the Editor of the. Norfolk Pilot : 
 
 I comply, iu the following paragraphs, with your request for an 
 expression of my views on the later phases of the silver question. 
 I write earnestly, but sorrowfully. The contemplation of the facts 
 to be narrated makes my task a sad one, but I shall write with 
 what spirit the exasperating topic may provoke. 
 
 British India is nearly as large as all Europe, excluding Russia 
 and Turkey, containing more than 200,000,000 of people, and pos- 
 sessing latent and patent resources surpassing estimation. 
 
 Its productions are almost exclusively agricultural, and its chief 
 staples are wheat and cotton. These facts make this great depen- 
 dency of the English crown a rival of the United States in the 
 produce markets of Europe : India is practically our only rival. 
 
 In the competition between the United States and British India, 
 in the production of wheat and cotton, the United States held the 
 advantage up to 1873. John Bull had tried to destroy this advan- 
 tage bv inciting a crusade against African slavery in the Southern 
 States, and thereby gradually bringing; on a bloody and destructive 
 conflict of sections in our country. He had discovered a mote in 
 Brother Jonathan's eye in the form of slavery, and had brought a 
 world of trouble on his American brother in extracting; that mote. 
 But his victim survived the trouble. The blood, carnage and des- 
 olations of civil war foiled to destroy our great industries. The 
 negroes went lustily to work on cotton, and produced as much of 
 it after the civil war as before. The cultivation of wheat grew 
 apace all through the Union, the production increasing marvel- 
 ously under the influence of steam plows, steam reapers and steam 
 threshers in the hands of stalwart veomen. 
 
44 SOUND MONEY. 
 
 We had another advantage over John Bull ; we produced a 
 prodigious quantity of silver ; more than seventy-five millions of 
 dollars' worth a year; and were able to export fifty-five or sixty 
 millions annually of this production. 
 
 Moreover, President Monroe had forbidden John Bull's inter- 
 ference with any of the sister republics south of us for any pur- 
 pose, whether for that of securing control of any of their industries 
 of which silver mining was chiefest, or influencing their policy in 
 any respect. 
 
 Wheat, cotton and silver ; these were the articles that constituted 
 the bulk of our balance of trade with Europe ; these were the 
 articles most closely connected with the trade and finances of 
 British India. The great staples of our foreign commerce (as 
 distinguished from products grown and consumed and not largely 
 shipped, such as Indian corn), are wheat, cotton and silver. It 
 was their supremacy in the exportation of these staples that gave 
 the United States their marvelous growth, prosperity and wealth. 
 They were about to transfer to Uncle Sam the sceptre of the seas. 
 
 John Bull saw his fate. By constructing a vast system of rail- 
 roads throughout India at incalculable expense, he had sought to 
 stimulate in the rich soils of the countries watered by the Indus 
 and the Ganges a production of wheat and cotton, which would 
 enable him to compete with us for the wealth, power, prosperity 
 and prestige incident to the profuse production of those staples. 
 But, although he controlled a population of 240,000,000 subjects, 
 while we could count but 65,000,000 citizens, his railroads and his 
 gigantic endeavors by these and other agencies to rival us in the 
 production of the two leading staples of commerce, failed of his 
 object, and it became necessary for him to resort to some abnormal 
 expedient to accomplish it. The expedient selected was what Mr. 
 Goschen calls "financing." 
 
 As he nowhere possessed any valuable mines of silver, and, 
 being the sovereign of India, was a purchaser of that metal, John 
 Bull had nothing to lose and much to gain by depreciating the 
 value of silver. 
 
 The great hunger of India is for silver ; that metal is her pas- 
 sion ; all the silver that can be taken there is eagerlv absorbed in 
 the trinkets and hoards of her crowded millions of inhabitants. 
 
 When John Bull undertook to procure the demonetization of 
 
SOUND 310 XEY. 45 
 
 silver by the United States in 1873, the intrinsic value of the silver 
 dollar was three and a half per cent, greater than that of the gold 
 dollar; the metal in the silver dollar being worth more, as a com- 
 modity in the market, than the metal in the gold dollar by that 
 premium. For ninety years of our bimetalic policy, silver had 
 never gone below the par of gold, and often gone above it, before 
 1873. 
 
 It is an undenied historical fact that the act of 1873, purporting 
 to be a revisal of the laws relating to the national mints, but 
 which put a stop to the coinage of the silver dollar and divested 
 that coin of its legal tender function, was furtively passed. Xeither 
 the Congress which passed it, nor the president (Grant) who 
 signed it, knew of these important features of the act. The ques- 
 tion of demonetizing silver and closing against it the mints which 
 had been engaged in its free coinage since the beginning of the 
 federal government, had never been presented to the American 
 people, nor debated, nor considered by them. The act which 
 effected this purpose was never authorized by them ; and, having 
 been furtively passed in a period in which specie payments were 
 suspended, not a hundred people in the land knew for. years alter 
 silver had been demonetized, that the fell trick had been practiced. 
 
 John Bull had formed the acquaintance of two incorruptible 
 members of Congress, one in each house ; he never deals with any 
 but incorruptible men. When he needs and confers with such 
 characters they immediately become so rich that they scorn the 
 bagatelle of a bribe. 
 
 The metals which are called precious metals derive their pre- 
 ciousness almost exclusively from their being used as money; and 
 they are coined into, and decreed to be, money, by the govern- 
 ments in which they circulate. Substances which have real in- 
 trinsic value are disqualified for use as money by that fact : it is 
 only substances that have little value except as money that are 
 coined by the public mints, and are made legal tender by the fiat 
 of law. John Bull, through several of his ablest authors on pub- 
 lic economics, has taught that those who stickle for intrinsic value 
 in the paper and metals of which legal tender money is made, are 
 dunces — except those who are rascals. 
 
 The closing of our mints to silver, and its deprival by law of the 
 legal tender function, converted it in this country into a mere com- 
 
46 SOUND MONEY. 
 
 modity of commerce. It immediately began to sink in value, and 
 ran down in a short time to a point at which the silver in a dollar 
 was worth only eighty cents. By that time the American people 
 came to a knowledge of the trick which had been secretly prac- 
 ticed in 1873, and required Congress to enact a law, in the Bland 
 act, remonetizing the silver dollar; that is to say, restoring; to it 
 the legal tender function, and requiring the mints to coin two and 
 a half to four millions of them per month, from silver purchased 
 by the government for that purpose. The mints, however, still 
 remained closed to the people. Nobody's 412^ grains of silver 
 could be coined into a legal tender dollar, but those bought in 
 open market by the government, from silver offered there as a 
 commodity. 
 
 Our production of silver was at least $75,000,000 a year; our 
 government's purchases under the Bland act were but little more 
 than $30,000,000 ; and silver, under this w T eak demand of a single 
 purchaser, went down and fell and cheapened in the market. 
 
 By 1890, so frightful was the debacle in the market price of 
 silver, that even the incorruptible Sherman, still cherishing faint 
 hopes of the Presidency, became frightened at the results of the 
 demonetizing act of 1873. He, therefore, induced the passage 
 of an act by Congress authorizing the government to purchase 
 4,500,000 ounces of silver per month at market prices in open mar- 
 ket and to coin the metal into dollars and to store it in the treas- 
 ury, issuing certificates against it in the form of treasurj 7 notes. 
 
 In pursuance of this Sherman act the government thus took up 
 just about as much of our annual silver production as would have 
 been exported each year to Europe over and above our home con- 
 sumption. This measure stayed the fall of the price of silver in 
 the market, and held it somewhere between sixty and seventy 
 cents for the dollars' worth while the act was in force. But such 
 a result did not accord with the policy of John Bull. He resolved 
 that the Sherman act should be repealed and silver left to sink 
 lower in price on the market. We know what a hellobelloo John 
 Bull raised in this country in 1893; that an extra session of Con- 
 gress was called ; that all the power of the American executive 
 and John Bull's agents in this country was exerted to secure a 
 repeal of the Sherman act; that the House of Representatives 
 passed the repealing bill promptly without debate by a majority 
 
SOUND MONET. 47 
 
 of some 140 votes ; and that after hanging lire for some months 
 
 * CD C7 1 
 
 in the Senate it finally passed that body. Then silver took another 
 tnmble in price. 
 
 Then John Bull's moral sense became ao;ain offended. He saw 
 another mote in Brother Jonathan's eve. He scornfully asked his 
 American brother if he thought that that sixty cent dollar of his 
 which continued to pass all over the world at its legal tender value 
 of one hundred cents, was an '< honest " dollar. His great writers 
 had taught that there was no money except what the law of the 
 country made so by its fiat, and that none but dunces (except ras- 
 cals) would contend for " intrinsic value " in money, whether 
 made of paper or metal; yet, nevertheless, John Bull, employing 
 the language of the rascal, continued sneeringlv to berate Brother 
 
 <D CD ' O •- 
 
 Jonathan for circulating his 80 cent, 70 cent, 60 cent, 50 cent 
 dollar. 
 
 There was a beam, however, in John Bull's own eye. He had 
 closed his Indian mints to the coinage of the rupee from silver 
 brought to it by the ryots, but was running the mints up to their 
 highest capacity in the coinage of legal tender rupees from silver 
 he was buying in the United States at the constantly falling prices 
 which he had managed to bring them down to there. The par of 
 a rupee is about forty-eight cents. About two and two-thirds 
 rupees are coined from an ounce of silver. 
 
 From time immemorial an ounce of silver has bought a bushel 
 
 CD 
 
 of wheat, and a silver rupee three pounds of cotton in India. The 
 ryots of the Indus and the Ganges are a race of yesterday, to-day 
 and forever. TThat they were a thousand vears a^o, thev are now : 
 and what they are now, they are likely to be throughout the 
 impenetrable future. 
 
 The ryots will take the same weights of silver for their wheat 
 and cotton which thev have done from the beginning of their race, 
 
 «/ CD CD * 
 
 regardless of its "intrinsic value.'"' But whether they are willing 
 to do so or not, there is John Bull coining the silver he has bought 
 in America for half its monev value or less into legal tender ru- 
 pees, held up to their par value by the fiat of British Indian law, 
 and exchanging!; these coins for Indian wheat and cotton. 
 
 So it is, so it is, so it is. John Bull is now buying American 
 silver at less than 50 per cent, of its money value and coining it 
 into rupees of full money value. He is buying Indian wheat with 
 
48 SOUND MONEY. 
 
 silver which cost him only at the rate of 50 cents for what he pays 
 per bushel, and Indian cotton with silver which costs him only 6 
 cents for what he pays per pound. The rates which he thus pays 
 fix the prices of wheat and cotton in Liverpool. They determine 
 the prices of American wheat and cotton in our own markets. 
 
 The result is that the quotations for cotton are less than six 
 cents, and Mr. Corbin told me last week in Richmond that the 
 farmers of the Rappahannock had sold their wheat of 1894 for a 
 net of only forty-eight cents a bushel. The end is not yet. The 
 prices of all material property are graded by the prices of wheat, 
 cotton and silver. 
 
 It has been announced in the English Parliament that the British 
 government expected to bring down the market value of the silver 
 in the American dollar to thirty-two cents, which will put cotton 
 down to five cents and wheat to less than thirty-seven and a half 
 cents a bushel. Such a result is inevitable unless a check be ap- 
 plied by ourselves to a policy which is pauperizing our agricultu- 
 rists, covering all our second grade lands with brambles and briars, 
 and slowly and surely converting our great wheat and cotton 
 growing regions into a wilderness of lost industries. 
 
 The remedy is as simple as the cause of the universal depression 
 in the business of the country is obvious. It consists in restoring 
 the financial laws and reinstating the financial policy under which 
 our country grew up and prospered and flourished during the first 
 ninety years of its history, up to the shameful year 1873. 
 
 Three-fourths of the human race are silver-using and not gold- 
 using populations. 
 
 To establish closer relations with the silver-using races, our 
 government, refraining from trusting the work to a corporation of 
 tory capitalists, controlled by cockney bondholders, might, on its 
 own account, take hold of the Nicaragua ship canal, and push it 
 to prompt completion, bringing the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans 
 and peoples together. 
 
 The Sandwich Islands are, of course, ours by natural right, 
 those necessary stepping-stones to Asia, the reservoir of commer- 
 cial wealth. We get nothing but hard bargains in our trade with 
 Europe. We obtain wealth untold, which is power immeasurable, 
 from trade with Asia. To command that, is for us to command 
 this globe.. 
 
SOUND 310 XEY. 49 
 
 "Why do New England statesmen oppose annexation? All of 
 our valuable annexations have been made by southern statesmen. 
 Louisiana up to Canada, on the right bank of the Mississippi, by 
 Jefferson ; Texas by that true Virginian, John Tyler ; California, 
 which spread our country out to the Pacific, by Polk, a North 
 Carolina-Tennessean. "We don't want to annex Asia, or any part 
 of her, but it is of immense importance that we command her 
 commerce. We cannot do this except by annexing the Sandwich 
 Islands. It was Democratic Presidents who made our country 
 great bv annexations. Why should the present Democratic Presi- 
 dent hesitate to follow such noble precedents as Jefferson, Tyler 
 and Polk have set him 
 
 But for the Hawaiian people, who are a dwindling handful, we 
 need care nothing. General S. C Armstrong, of the Hampton 
 Institute, in his letters from the Sandwich Islands in 1880, said of 
 the Hawaiians that thev had no word for home, or mother, or 
 husband, or wife. 
 
 Annexation would plant American civilization there and make 
 those words the foundation stone of that civilization. "With the 
 Xicaraguan canal and the Sandwich Islands part and parcel of the 
 American Republic, John Bull would again be baffled, and the 
 remorseless wheels of manifest destiny would again roll on silver- 
 mounted. 
 
 It is a sorrowful thought that so many thousands of American 
 citizens are giving aid and comfort to John Bull in the most 
 deadly war he ever waged against the independence of our country. 
 
 But the disloyalty has not extended to the masses of the Amer- 
 ican people. They are fast becoming alive to the danger that is 
 sapping their prosperity. They are indignant at the toryism of 
 the great money class. They are in emeute against the old parties 
 and politicians which have surrendered to the hypnotizing power 
 of the monometallic octopus. They are resolved in the good year 
 1896 to drag down the men who in the arrogance of undesert are 
 filling our country's high places of honor and trust, and to replace 
 them with men who will realize that they have a country to serve 
 and to save. 
 
A BIMETALIST'S STUDY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 Causes of Our Present Monetary Disorders. 
 
 Abingdon, Va., July 27th, 1893. 
 
 To the Editor of the Richmond Times: 
 
 The real causes of our financial troubles are not domestic. 
 They are of Foreign contrivance and direction. The President 
 has called Congress into extra session because of a novel order of 
 the British Government respecting the Asiatic rupee. The Presi- 
 dent's call is unprecedented in financial history. I refer to it, not 
 to criticise, much less to censure, but as showing that the financial 
 welfare of our country is seriously affected by transactions foreign 
 and not American. A study of England's East India policy by the 
 American people is compelled by the President's call. It brings 
 the finance discussion to a climax. It lifts it out of the ruts of 
 provincial partisanship and directs it to the true sources of inquiry. 
 The proclamation is the most auspicious fact of the times. It 
 remains for Congress to put forward its statesmen and not its 
 empirics, and show the country whether it possesses any Hamiltons 
 or Jeft'ersons in finance. 
 
 A very influential class of bankers in our Eastern States ascribe, 
 or affect to ascribe, our financial disorders to the Sherman act. I 
 am not a partisan of the act. In the great matter of world's 
 finance it has no rightful place or relevancy. It has had no agency 
 in bringing about existing financial conditions. The hard times 
 are world wide. The severity is greater in Australia than in 
 America. All Europe is suffering; the producing classes, manu- 
 facturing and agricultural, more than others. Agriculture is 
 prostrate in England herself, and in Scotland, and Archbishop 
 Walsh has pictured with electric vividness the distress of the Irish 
 in Ireland. The Sherman act is not known in Australia or Europe, 
 
SOUND MONEY. 51 
 
 or in the kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Congress will 
 be wise to ignore as well the bete noire itself as its deeriers. 
 
 All the world over are trade and finance off the normal basis. 
 If I were required to answer in a phrase the continually pressed 
 question, what is the matter with business everywhere? I would 
 say that property values have gone to wreck and ruin, that the 
 bottom is knocked out of prices. 
 
 But this answer is, of course, empirical; the question recurs. 
 Why are all values in ruin '? I hope to be able in the course of 
 this paper to bring some elucidation to the inquiry. 
 
 It is conceded by all who have the knowledge of study and 
 instruction, that gold has risen about 50 per cent, in value, com- 
 pared with the general values of property since 1873. Inasmuch 
 as the business of all Europe is now conducted on the gold basis, 
 and inasmuch as our Eastern bankers, and our Secretaries of 
 Treasury have succeeded in bringing the business of our own bi- 
 metalic country practically to the gold basis, therefore, it results 
 that the debtor classes are paying dollar debts with dollar and a 
 half money — a state of things entailing distress in all liquidations, 
 and ruin in most of them, by its sweeping destruction of margins. 
 
 The situation is better realized when it is described in a manner 
 the reverse of that just employed. Gold, notwithstanding its 
 rise in value, being still the enforced standard, and continuing 
 therefore to be rated at a hundred cents, the average values of 
 property in general must be regarded as having fallen, compared 
 with gold, to sixty-six and two-third cents; wheat, cotton, lands, 
 lumber, iron, silver and property generally, having lost thirty-three 
 and one-third per cent, when sold for money estimated as gold. 
 
 Whether, therefore, this gap (or gape) between the values of 
 gold and of property be ascribed to a shrinkage in propert}? values, 
 or honestly to a rise in gold, the pinch is the same. 
 
 The difficulty of the times is that debtors and men in active 
 business, whose means of meeting obligations depend on sales of 
 property, have to pay full dollars with sixty-six cents assets, a rate 
 that is killing. If the Sherman act has any possible relation to 
 this condition of things, I am unable to discover it. 
 
 True that the deeriers of the act contend that it facilitates the 
 exportation of gold. But the exportation of money metals de- 
 pends upon the balance of trade. This is an axiomatic truth. If 
 
52 SOUND MONEY. 
 
 we owe abroad more than our exports will pay, we remit gold to 
 discharge the resulting debt. Gold is going abroad as the result of 
 a series of very heavy dealings in past years ; an example of which 
 I will very imperfectly describe. An American dealer in wheat, 
 who has made many shipments of that grain to Liverpool, through 
 a series of years, drawing bills against it on the basis of the prices 
 ruling when the bills were drawn, finds at last that in consequence 
 of continual and heavy declines in the prices of wheat, he has 
 overdrawn to the extent of one or more hundred thousands of 
 dollars. This sum he has to pay in order to square accounts, and 
 it may be hoped to wind up the losing business. The balances 
 being heavily against this country, bills are at a premium, and it 
 costing less to ship gold, the unfortunate American dealer in wheat 
 sends the gold off to wipe out his debt, blindly oblivious of the 
 Sherman act. When he began his dealings wheat commanded 
 one dollar and sixty cents a bushel ; when he closed them it brought 
 only seventy cents. In fact, the most crushing incident of the 
 genera] fall of prices, that is to say, of the deplorable rise of gold, 
 is the havoc it has made with our balance of trade ; for much, 
 very much, is the matter with our foreign exports. 
 
 The comments of the Xew York Journal of Commerce on the 
 official tables it publishes of the foreign commerce of the United 
 States for 1892, were as follows, in its issue of the 23d of January 
 last: • 
 
 " For the year 1892 this country imported only $876,198,179 in 
 foreign merchandise, and sent out $938,419,893 of domestic pro- 
 duce and manufactures, showing an excess of merchandise exports 
 over merchandise imports of $62,221,714. . In addition to this 
 there have been sent out to foreign countries during the last year 
 $112,472,304 in specie, against an import of only $39,177,189, 
 showing an excess of $73,295,106 in specie, making a total nom- 
 inal excess of $135,516,198 in exports over imports; and in the 
 face of this our bankers are still shipping millions of gold every 
 week. The nominal balance of trade on the year's business has 
 fallen off millions of specie." 
 
 The Journal of Commerce was speaking of the year 1892. Only 
 a few days ago the Richmond Times, speaking with reference to 
 the first half of 1893, remarked : 
 
 " The treasury department has issued a statement of the expor- 
 
SOUND MOSEY. 53 
 
 tation of breadsturfs from this country for the month of June, 
 1893, for the six months ending with June, 1893, and for the twelve 
 months ending with June, 1893, which contains some striking 
 facts. The values of those for the month of June, 1893, were 
 §15,912,751, against 816,448,977 for June, 1892. For the six 
 months ending with June, 1893, the values were 884,356,414, as 
 against -8135,935,807 for the corresponding six months of the pre- 
 ceding year. For the twelve months ending June, 1893, the values 
 were 8188,981,992, as against 8238,925,000 for the year ending 
 June, 1892. Our exports of breadstuff's for the twelve months 
 just ended are, therefore, 8100,000,000 less than they were in the 
 preceding year." 
 
 Gold having disastrously risen, property values being in ruin, 
 our foreign commerce being crippled by adverse balances, and our 
 exports powerless to rectify them, the question behind all these 
 phenomena recurs, how did this state of things come about ? 
 
 I come to the consideration of the mischievous rupee, a " sacred ' : 
 coin satanically misused. Until 1871-1873 gold and silver passed 
 current all over the world as money. They had been the money 
 of the great nations of antiquity and of the Bible ; they are the 
 rnonev of nature : thev are the two onlv metals which have ever 
 been found in the experience of mankind to possess the qualities 
 of precious value ; nice divisibility ; minimum susceptibility to 
 abrasion and wear ; maximum difficulty of simulation ; and fasci- 
 nating beauty, in the form of coins, to the eye of rich and poor. 
 Until the last twenty-five years the folly and greed of man had 
 never conceived the purpose, or dared the feat of demonetizing 
 either of them. 
 
 They passed freely as money all over the world, none so haughty 
 as to deny them welcome. They passed in the forms most con- 
 venient for money ; that is to sav, in the coins struck off at the 
 various mints of Governments. Their relative value was fixed by 
 each countrv's laws of coinage and les;al tender. That relative 
 value was virtually the same in all countries, beino- made the sub- 
 ject of mutual and universal consensus. True, that, in order to 
 prevent an abnormal movement of coins, not resulting exclusively 
 from ordinary trade operations, slight differences were allowed in 
 their ratio. The United States of America being the chief pro- 
 ducer of silver, the ratio in weight of sixteen of silver to one of 
 
54 
 
 SOUND MONEY. 
 
 gold was adopted here, while in Europe, where the principal deal- 
 ings with the East, which was the great importer of silver, were 
 conducted, the ratio fixed was fifteen and a half to one, and in 
 India, where silver was absorbed, the ratio was fifteen to one. 
 Under these ratios silver was slightly cheaper in America, where 
 it was produced, than in India, where it was consumed; otherwise 
 our silver coins would have had too strong a tendency to flow to 
 India instead of silver bullion. 
 
 These ratios were of common universal consent. It was impor- 
 tant that all the great nations of the earth should assent to them; 
 and necessary that several of the most powerful should do so ; 
 France and the United States being in the quorum. Under these 
 ratios, with gold and silver as the universal money, the commerce 
 of the world proceeded ; the values of all property becoming ad- 
 justed to the conservative, the wise, it may also be said the Divine, 
 economy of bimetalism. Both metals, except in England, were 
 full legal tender, on the basis of the conventional ratios that have 
 been described. Prices were remunerative, and money, except so 
 far as wars and revolutions prevented, was in conservative abund- 
 ance, the rich using gold and the poor silver. The following were 
 the prices of sundry substances in the two years preceding and the 
 two years following our act of 1873, denying free coinage and full 
 leo;al tender value to silver: 
 
 
 WHEAT. 
 
 CORN. 
 
 OATS. 
 
 COTTON. 
 
 SILVER. 
 
 YEARS. 
 
 Per 
 
 Bushel. 
 
 Per 
 Bushel. 
 
 Per 
 
 Bushel. 
 
 Upland 
 
 Middling. 
 
 Per m: 
 
 Per Ounce 
 In London. 
 
 1872. 
 
 $1 61 
 
 SO 67 
 
 $0 48 
 
 $0 20 
 
 ..60| Pence. 
 
 1873. 
 
 1 55 
 
 64 
 
 49 
 
 18 
 
 .58* 
 
 1874. 
 
 1 35 
 
 88 
 
 62 
 
 17 
 
 .57* 
 
 1875. 
 
 1 23 
 
 82 
 
 62 
 
 15 
 
 .56| 
 
 1893. 
 
 70 
 
 48 
 
 42 
 
 07-} 
 
 .34 Pence. 
 
 The policy of demonetizing silver — that is to say, denying to 
 
SOUND MONEY. 55 
 
 it free coinage — began in Europe in 1871, and in the United States 
 in 1873. I ask the reader to observe here that the only substances 
 which the above table shows to have been immediately affected by 
 that policy were wheat, cotton and silver. These were the articles 
 most closely connected with the trade and finances of British India. 
 The great staples of our foreign commerce (as distinguished from 
 products grown and consumed and not largely shipped, such as 
 Indian corn) are wheat, cotton and silver. It was their suprem- 
 acy in the exportation of these staples that gave the United States 
 their marvellous growth, prosperity and wealth. They were about 
 to transfer to the United States the sceptre of the seas. 
 
 England saw her fate. By constructing a vast system of rail- 
 roads throughout India at incalculable expense, she had sought to 
 stimulate in the rich soils of the countries watered by the Indus 
 and the Ganges a production of wheat and cotton which would 
 enable her to compete with us for the wealth, power, prosperity 
 and prestige incident to the profuse production of these staples. 
 But although she controlled a population of 240,000,000 subjects, 
 while we could count but 65,000,000 citizens, her railroads and her 
 gigantic endeavors by these and other agencies to rival us in the 
 production of the two leading staples of commerce failed of their 
 object, and it became necessary to resort to some abnormal expe- 
 dient to accomplish it. The expedient selected was what Mr. 
 Goshen calls " financing." 
 
 As she nowhere possessed any valuable mines of silver, and 
 being the sovereign of India, was a purchaser of that metal, she 
 had nothing to lose and much- to gain by depreciating its value. 
 This was, however, but an incident of her policy, the portentous 
 object of which will appear in what follows. 
 
 There is no direct proof that the clandestine demonetization of 
 silver by the United States in 1873 was procured by emissaries 
 from London. Mr. Tyler wrote from Sherwood Forest in De- 
 cember, 1860 : " The great weakness of all confederacies, through 
 all time, has consisted in their exposure to the intrigues of other 
 powers ; and most surely if there ever was a motive to influence 
 foreign governments to attempt a course of division and overthrow 
 it exists in the case of our own confederation. Hoi din q- together 
 for forty years longer, and all the other governments* would 
 be but pigmies in comparison." Bribery and intrigue are always 
 
56 SOUND MONEY. 
 
 unsusceptible of proof. But a study of the cunning by which the 
 legislation ot 1873 was enacted by a Congress, wholly ignorant and 
 unconscious of what it was doing, and wholly unauthorized by the 
 people to take such action, will convince any rational mind that it 
 was the result of foreign intrigue. Silver had been coined in the 
 mints and current as legal tender money in the United States from 
 1785 until 1878. But in February of that year, by mysterious 
 agency, Congress was deceived into demonetizing that metal by 
 prohibiting its free coinage in the mints of the United States, and 
 making it legal tender only for sums not greater than 85. Ger- 
 many, which had in 1871 exacted $1,200,000,000 of gold from 
 France as a war indemnity, had also been persuaded before the 
 mysterious action of the American Congress, to suspend the coin- 
 age of silver in the imperial mints. Most of the smaller powers 
 of Europe are dominated by England and Germany, and the pro- 
 curing of similar action by them was a measure of easy accom- 
 plishment. Finally, several years later, France was obliged, in 
 self-defence, to close her mints to all silver but her own, though 
 continuing to accord to silver its full les;al tender function. And 
 thus it came about that the free and unlimited coinage of silver 
 was found, soon after 1873, to have ceased throughout Europe and 
 in the United States. Indeed, silver had come to be coined 
 nowhere throughout the civilized world in any quantity, except in 
 British India, for it is useless to speak of the Spanish- American 
 republics. In British India alone did the free coinage of silver 
 prevail, the amount coined in 1891 having been £17,000,000 sterl- 
 ing, or 885,000,000, chiefly in the form of the rupee, the par value 
 of which is 48 cents, which is its legal tender value in India. 
 Xearly all the silver which goes into India goes from London. 
 
 The producers of wheat and cotton in India uninquiringly accept 
 the legal tender rupee at its par value for their crops without 
 thought of the cost in London, of the silver of which it is coined. 
 They are willing dupes in the matter. From time immemorial 
 the myriad millions of people in what is now British India have 
 been in the habit of selling their wheat at the rate of an ounce of 
 silver for a bushel of grain. They are superstitiously impervious 
 to foreign ideas, averse to innovations, fixed in old habits, devoted 
 to accustomed methods, hostile to novelty, and stolidly repellant 
 of change in every form. They accept an ounce per bushel for 
 
SOUXD MONEY. 57 
 
 their wheat, and a corresponding price per pound for their cotton, 
 with sublimated indifference to the fluctuations of prices in the 
 markets. 
 
 The fact results that England obtains wheat and cotton in India 
 at a cost graduated to the cost of silver in London. By procuring 
 the demonetization of silver by the United States and Europe, she 
 has been enabled so to put down the market price of the metal in 
 London as to leave a margin of profit measured by that deprecia- 
 tion on the wheat and cotton bought with legal tender rupees 
 in India. When silver in London before 1873 was at the par 
 59 pence (equal to 118 cents) per ounce, that was the price she 
 paid for wheat in India. To bring it to Liverpool cost 6 pence (or 
 12 cents) more, and so the price of India wheat in Liverpool was 
 the price per ounce of silver in London, plus 12 cents. That is to 
 say that when silver was at a par of ]18 cents before 1873, Indian 
 wheat could not be laid down in Liverpool for less than 130 cents 
 net, American wheat bringing more or less higher prices, by reason 
 of its higher grades and quality. These were not only remunera- 
 tive, but profitable prices. The case was similar with cotton. 
 
 But since 1873 how has the case been ? The silver rupee still 
 retains its legal tender value, and par purchasing power in India ; 
 while the silver from which it is coined can be purchased in the 
 London market for 33 pence or 66 cents per ounce. The result is 
 that the price of wheat, this staple product of our country, has 
 been depressed in our own markets to figures approximating the 
 66 cents per ounce which London vouchsafes to pay for our silver. 
 Such is the situation, such the result brought about by the 
 " financing " of England. 
 
 But the story is not all told. A new step has been taken. By 
 the recent order of the British Secretarv of the State for India, 
 the Indian mints are closed to the silver of the public, and none 
 of the metal will hereafter be coined, except that presented by the 
 government itself. The effect of this measure is to close the silver 
 market of London to all purchases for India except those made by 
 the government, and to stop the exportation of silver to India, 
 except on public account. Still another part of the story, how- 
 ever, is yet to be told. Silver commands in London about thirty- 
 three pence : but the Secretary for India accompanies the order 
 which has been referred to by the announcement that the govern- 
 
58 SOUND MONEY. 
 
 raent will determine for itself the price it will pay for silver, and 
 has now determined that this price shall be one shilling four pence 
 per ounce — that is to say : sixteen pence, or thirty-two cents. Mr. 
 Gladstone says to the American people : " I will close Her Majesty's 
 mints in India absolutely to your silver, and for such of your 
 metal as I may require for my own purposes I will give you half 
 the London price." 
 
 Mr. Cleveland has promptly responded to this characteristic 
 insult, and has called Congress into extra session. England's 
 financing has rained the agricultural industries of this country. 
 All prices sympathize with those of wheat, cotton and silver, our 
 great money crops. In order to accomplish the ruin of the wheat 
 and cotton culture of America, it was necessary to strike the silver 
 miners. The miners are in emeute ; and in spite of the sarcasms 
 of Eastern newspapers, I will say, in manly, patriotic emeute. 
 The agriculturists will join them. Effervescence is a dangerous 
 popular symptom. .Congress will meet in extra session in the 
 seething month af August. 
 
 The President's proclamation calling Congress together was 
 rendered necessary by the British-Sherman act or order, which I 
 have described. Until that order the Indian mints were free to 
 the public, just as the mints of the United States were until 1873. 
 The order closes the Indian mints to the silver of the public, just 
 as our Sherman act closes the American mints to the silver of our 
 citizens. The order keeps open the Indian mints to the silver of 
 the government, just as our Sherman act does that thing. The 
 order announces the purpose of the government to purchase sil- 
 ver on its own account at its own price. Our Sherman act makes 
 the like provision, except that it does not fix the price of the silver 
 purchased, but leaves that to be fixed for us in London. Wall 
 Street is a colony and dependency of London, and it is amazing 
 to witness how rabidly denunciatory it is of the American-Sher- 
 man act, and how very quiescent it is with the British-Sherman act. 
 
 Well may the President of the United States be alarmed by a 
 Sherman act in LoncTon, which threatens to put silver down to six- 
 teen pence per ounce, American wheat down to sixty odd cents a 
 bushel, and American cotton to less than seven cents per pound. 
 The British act is a crushing thing; the American-Sherman act is 
 a mere bagatelle. 
 
SOUXJD MONEY. 59 
 
 Distrust, want of confidence, are universal in the United States. 
 The situation is alarming. The danger is that silver will gra&ti- 
 ally go down in value, until it reaches the price at which Mr. Glad- 
 stone's secretary fixes it — sixteen pence (thirty -three cents) an 
 ounce — bringing wheat and cotton and every staple connected with 
 India down with it. Congress will be called upon to provide a 
 remedy for the great financial distress prevailing, and the greater 
 distress threatened. It will fail to provide the remedy. "Wall 
 Street will prevent; England will prevent. Mr. Tyler's letter 
 supplies the reason. 
 
 The Sherman act directs the purchase of four and a half mil- 
 lions of ounces of silver per month, or fifty-four millions of ounces 
 per annum, by the Secretary of the Treasury on government ac- 
 count. This is about the quantity of the metal that would be 
 annually exported, over and above the home consumption. It 
 directs the silver to be paid for with Treasury notes, and makes 
 the notes legal tender, receivable in payment of public dues, and 
 redeemable in gold or silver coins at the Treasurv. As the banks 
 of Wall Street and of the Atlantic States vigorously boycott silver 
 coin, all recent Secretaries of the Treasury have been redeeming 
 Treasury notes in s^old. This is almost the onlv 2,'old now avail- 
 able for exportation, and it is the pusilanimity of secretaries, and 
 not the Sherman act, that produces the exportations of gold which 
 so alarm the bankers. The remedy for the special evil is obviously 
 not the repeal of the act, but a command by Congress to the Sec- 
 retary to exercise his right of redeeming Treasury notes by doing 
 so with silver. 
 
 Until the British Sherman act was announced, our bimetalists 
 preferred the free coinage of silver to our own Sherman act. But 
 now they object to the repeal of our act, because that would with- 
 draw from the market the only considerable purchaser of silver, 
 and tend to reduce that metal to the level of a mere commodity, 
 having only the value derived from its use in the arts — leaving 
 gold as the only metalic money of Europe and the United States. 
 The repeal would thus inaugurate an era of shin-plasters, that is to 
 say, of paper money not based on coin, for gold would hide, and 
 there would be nothing to stave off the shin-plasters but a few 
 hundred millions of le^al tender silver coins now in the Treasury 
 of the United States and in circulation, which we daily hear com- 
 
60 SOUND MONEY. 
 
 plained of as dishonest money, a burden and a curse. Already 
 the banks of Wall Street are issuing shin-plasters in the form of 
 clearinghouse certificates. Their example will be contagious. 
 The 10 per cent, tax will be no bar to shin-plasters. 
 
 The true and only remedy for the disorders of the times cannot 
 be hastily obtained. 
 
 Time, patience, long, hard and earnest work will be necessary 
 to secure it. The remedy for the financial evils of the day is the 
 same for all countries afflicted by them, and not merely our own. 
 It consists in simple retrogression, in a return to the conditions of 
 1873. The sine qua nou of healthy finance is the restoration of sil- 
 ver to its wonted place in the financial economy of the world. 
 Some degree of co-operation among nations is advisable. The 
 Silver Conference Convention of 1892, which was called by Mr. 
 Harrison as an affectation, should be revived by Congress as a 
 reality. Let France, the United States, and the States of the 
 Latin Union re-establish the bimetalic ratios of 1873, and the work 
 is done. England cannot demonetize silver in India. That metal 
 is the money of three-fourths of the population of the earth. In 
 Asia it is money, whether coined or uncoined. To be money in 
 Europe and America it is necessary that its coinage ratios of weight 
 with gold be regulated b} 7 law. The ratios of 1873 are the best 
 and most convenient and conservative that can be adopted. 
 
 The Secretary of State for India has undertaken to establish a 
 ratio for the world in his order, which has been mentioned. He 
 will purchase silver at 16 pence or 33 cents per ounce ; his ratio, 
 therefore, being twenty-five or thirty to one. His declaration is 
 insulting enough, but it will fail to materialize. The best money 
 ever known to man is metalic money. The two metals have little 
 intrinsic value aside from that derived from their use as money. 
 Their most considerable value comes from the stamp of the mint 
 and the laws of the sovereign power making them legal tender. 
 The} r are not money by virtue of being standards of value, but 
 they measure values because they are money. 
 
 Congress, in our country, has absolute power to declare what is 
 money. If it had no conscience it could make gold bonds solva- 
 ble in salmon bricks. 
 
 There is no reason why the silver dollar should be as big as a 
 cart wheel. It is a hallucination to suppose that the ratio of 16 or 
 
SOUND MONEY. 61 
 
 15J to 1, established before 1873 with reference exclusively to con- 
 venience of use, should not be reinstated. The gold dollar of that 
 period was a little too small and the silver dollar a little too large 
 for convenience : but the ratio was established, notwithstanding, 
 as the best that was practicable. The fiat made the ratio right ; 
 the fiat made the gold and silver coins money. What is needed 
 is money, and not standards, nor any degree of intrinsicality. All 
 talk of standard and intrinsic value is idle and delusive. Money 
 is the thing needed, and nothing but the fiat of Congress can 
 create legal tender money in the United States. To contend that 
 a silver dollar shall be enlarged commensurately with England's 
 depreciation of silver metal in London is as silly as to contend 
 that a legal tender treasury note shall be amplified until the 
 intrinsic value of the paper of which it is made shall be equal to 
 the value of the note. Xo, the ratio cannot be changed without 
 making the gold dollar too small or the silver one too large, and 
 both principle and convenience would be sacrificed by the change. 
 
 The United States must take the lead in the work of restoration. 
 Our country will have allies enough if she will only take the lead 
 and hold it worthily. England will be hostile either openly or 
 clandestinely. The Gladstone Government is without honor, prin- 
 ciple or faith. In this matter of the Indian rupee and the Ameri- 
 can dollar it will make Perfidious Albion more perfidious still in 
 the ratio of 30 to 1. 
 
 I thank the Times most sincerely for publishing this paper. I 
 thank it the more because, unless I should be fortunate enough to 
 modify its opinions, what I have said is in violent antagonism to 
 all its teachings. But its readers form an important part of the 
 people, and in this country all statesmanship resides in the people. 
 It is rarely found in politicians, whether in or out of public posi- 
 tion. These are in general but the partisans of preconceived ideas 
 adopted at second hand, and their whole effort is to force these 
 ideas upon the public, right or wrong ; so that, if their preconcep- 
 tions be erroneous, their whole influence and work are pernicious. 
 So with editors, in degree. Let the people hear both sides. 
 Therein lies the safety of the republic. If you and I differ on the 
 questions discussed in this paper, let your readers judge between 
 us. 
 
Congress Warned Against Tampering with the Ratios, 
 
 ON WHICH THE TWO THOUSAND MILLIONS OF SILVER 
 
 NOW IN CIRCULATION HAVE BEEN COINED— 
 
 SERIOUS QUESTION. 
 
 Abixgdox, Va., August 12th, 1893. 
 
 To the Editor of the Dispatch: 
 
 The President has stated in the best form possible the argument 
 in favor of the unconditional repeal of the Sherman act — a measure 
 which would be the final step in the demonetization of silver. 
 The two objections to the net which the President urges are — 
 first, that its continuance must cause a destruction of the parity 
 that is now established between gold and silver ; and, secondly, 
 that it must prolong the exhaustive exportations of gold that have 
 been going on from this country for some time past. 
 
 As to the first objection, does it not occur to every mind that 
 the unconditional repeal of the Sherman act must inevitably so 
 depress the price of silver bullion in the market as to destroy the 
 legally-established and long-existing parity which it is so important 
 to maintain ? 
 
 This is a very serious consideration, and Congress is bound, in 
 repealing the act, to provide some countercheck to the fall of silver 
 bullion that would inevitably result. Moreover, it is a question 
 not only for the United States, but for all nations. Our govern- 
 ment is now the only purchaser of silver in the world. The clos- 
 ing of the Indian mints to the metal puts an end to purchases for 
 remittance to India. The closing of the Indian mints caused a 
 fall of 15 or 20 per cent, in the price of this metal. The uncon- 
 ditional repeal of the Sherman act, by withdrawing from the 
 market the only remaining purchaser of the metal, will produce a 
 like fall of price. Will it be possible to maintain the parity of 16 
 to 1 in this country, and of 15J to 1 in Europe, of the two thou- 
 sand millions of coined silver now in circulation after the fall in 
 price of silver bullion that must ensue ? 
 
SOCXJD MONEY. 
 
 ON THESE RATIOS. 
 
 Let it not be forgotten that all the silver in circulation in the 
 United States and Europe has been coined on these ratios. It is 
 no light matter, therefore, to take any action that threatens these 
 ratios, for the amount of legal tender silver money now in circula- 
 tion on both continents is immense, as will be seen in subsequent 
 paragraphs ; and I regret the action of the recent caucus of silver 
 men in Congress on the subject of the ratios. Those on which 
 two thousand millions of coined silver circulation are already 
 based ought not to be disturbed. 
 
 It is a fancy of the advocates of single-standard money that 
 nearly all Europe is on the gold basis, and that it has been so con- 
 trived that the United States is practically so, but let us look at 
 the statistics of the subject and learn from them how grave a mat- 
 ter it is to tamper with the value of silver. 
 
 GRAXD AGGREGATE. 
 
 The amount of legal tender money in the United States (offici- 
 ally reported for January 1, 1893,) is $1,611,321,763. Each dollar 
 of this large sum is as good as any other dollar, the grand aggre- 
 gate being composed of $649,788,020 of gold, §593,365,365 of 
 silver, and the rest (not including gold and silver certificates) 
 §368,168,378 of legal tender paper circulation. This sixteen hun- 
 dred and eleven millions of money is but little more than one- 
 third gold, and yet no difficulty has been experienced in maintain- 
 ing at a par with gold the remaining nine hundred and sixty-one 
 millions of silver and paper money in circulation. 
 
 The fiat of the government, its stamp on the silver coins, con- 
 joined with its legal tender laws, maintains this parity. Let it be 
 freely admitted that in respect to metallic money, this fiat should 
 not be employed too far in elevating a cheaper metal when coined 
 into parity with a dearer. Xay, let it be conceded, that even a 
 very powerful government cannot generally maintain a parity by 
 its mere fiat, between too money metals, when the bullion value in 
 the market of one of the metals falls very far below its par value. 
 But whether rightly or wrongly employed it is the fiat of govern- 
 ment that holds different kinds of currency in parity with each 
 other on the basis of legal tender laws. 
 
64 SOUND MONEY. 
 
 CIRCULATION. 
 
 As before stated the circulation of this country stands thus : 
 
 Gold coin, - - $649,788,020 
 
 Silver coins and uncovered paper coin, ... 961,533,743 
 
 Of this latter sum $593,365,365 is in the form of legal tender 
 silver coins ; the whole §961,533,743 of silver and paper being 
 made par in value by the fiat of the government. It is safe to 
 assume that the tiat will be strong enough to hold the silver at 
 par when the market value of the metal is less than 50 per cent. 
 of par, and that of the paper, of which currency is made, is noth- 
 ing ? Is not the Sherman act the only present safeguard against 
 an incalculable depreciation in nearly one thousand millions of the 
 money now current in the United States ? Would it not be an act 
 of fatuity to repeal without providing a substitute in some form ? 
 
 It is an old adage that " misery loves company." Under the 
 unconditional repeal of the act we Americans would have the poor 
 consolation of knowing there would be many sharers in our misery. 
 In all the countries of Europe which are now on the gold basis 
 their circulation of gold coins is reinforced by a liberal addition of 
 silver and paper money, held at par with gold by the fiat of the 
 governments. Just as in the United States, this augmentation of 
 the quantity of money in circulation beyond the amount of gold 
 possessed is an absolute necessity to the commerce of those coun- 
 tries. 
 
 MAKE-UP OF THE MONEY SUPPLY. 
 
 . In his valuable paper on the " Monetary Question of 1892," 
 recently published, Mr. Ottomar Haupt gives very important statis. 
 tics in regard to the make-up of the money supply in the world. 
 I need not say that Mr. Haupt is one of the highest living authori- 
 ties on monetaiy statistics. He has made calculations for the end 
 of 1885 and for the end of 1891 of the money circulation of the 
 following countries, viz : Austria, Belgium, the British Islands, 
 France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Portugal, Eussia, Scandinavia, 
 Spain, Turkey, other European countries, the United States and 
 Australia. 
 
SOUND MONEY. 65 
 
 LEGAL TENDER MONEY IN GOLD-STANDARD COUNTRIES. 
 
 Deducting from the total amount given by him the amounts ap- 
 portioned to Austria and Russia, as neither of these had the gold 
 standard, and leaving out entirely his figures for the end of 1885, 
 we have the following table of amounts stated in pounds sterling 
 in circulation at the end of 1891 of 
 
 Gold, -.----£ 644,000,000 
 
 Silver coined, - - - - - 320,000,000 
 
 Silver fractional coins, - - - 91,000,000 
 
 Uncovered paper money, - - - 240,000,000 
 
 Total gold, silver and paper, - - £1,295,000,000 
 
 LEGAL TENDER MONEY IN GOLD-STANDARD COUNTRIES. 
 
 Stated in dollars instead of pounds sterling the make-up of the 
 money circulation in the United States and the gold-standard 
 countries that have been named is as follows : 
 
 Gold, ------ $3,220,000,000 
 
 Silver, full coins, ----- 1,600,000,000 
 
 Silver, fractional coins, - 455,000,000 
 
 Uncovered paper, - - - - 1,200,000,000 
 
 Total gold, silver and paper, - - $6,475,000,000 
 
 The above is undoubtedly a close approximation to the amount 
 of money in the currencies of the countries that were on the gold 
 standard in 1891. When the figures are examined it will be seen 
 that at the end of 1891 the actual gold entering into the money of 
 the gold standard countries was less than one-half of the whole of 
 the money of those countries. To that extent, indeed, the term 
 gold standard is a misnomer, because it is really a standard of gold, 
 silver and paper money combined. It might perhaps be thought 
 that the $3,220,000,000 of gold determined the value of the 
 $3,255,000,000 of silver and paper, and that these took the value 
 of gold from association with it as legal tender. One would natu- 
 rally suppose that the larger body of money would be more apt to 
 control the value of the smaller than vice versa. 
 
66 SOUND MONEY. 
 
 FIXES THE PARITY. 
 
 But the question is immaterial, for it is the hat of the govern- 
 ment that fixes the parity in all those countries, aiid unless some 
 predominant, overbearing cause supervenes to disrupt this liga- 
 ment the parity will continue as long as the flat remains. 
 
 The question is, therefore, not only for the United States, but 
 for all the countries on what is erroneously supposed to be a gold 
 basis. What effect on the great amount of money other than 
 gold aud chiefly silver entering into their circulation will the with- 
 drawal from market of the largest purchaser of silver have upon 
 the mouey circulation of those countries ? If the result should be 
 so to depress the bullion price of silver as to destroy the legal 
 tender value of $2,055,000,000 of silver coins now circulating on a 
 parity with gold would not the amount of money in circulation be 
 diminished to the extent of that depression ? 
 
 TOTAL VALUE. 
 
 The prices of all the property and commodities of the countries 
 named are adjusted to a total money circulation of $6,475,000,000 ; 
 of which more than two thousand millions of dollars consists of 
 silver. If this coined silver shall so sympathize with silver bullion 
 in value as to lose the character of current money given it by the 
 fiat, it is an axiom of political economy that the money left is 
 money not so affected in value. Proportionally ; property of all 
 kinds will still further depreciate in price ; God knows how much. 
 It is painful to contemplate the consequences of a still further fall 
 in the values of all property, and still further rise in the value of 
 money. 
 
 The Congress of this country has never had a more serious 
 question before it than is presented by the President's message. 
 However pernicious may be the evils resulting from the continuance 
 of the Sherman act, and however desirable it may be to be relieved 
 of those evils, yet I cannot help thinking that the repeal of that 
 act without providing simultaneously against the depreciation of 
 silver, which repeal would cause, would be a fell blow inflicted by 
 Congress on all property values, and on all industries in the United 
 States and Europe. 
 
The Sherman Act of 1890. 
 
 THE CURRENCY FAMINE IN 1893, 
 
 HOW NOT TO RELIEVE IT—REPEAL MUST INTENSIFY 
 
 AND CAN'T RELIEVE IT. 
 
 Abingdon, Va., August 31st, 1893. 
 
 To the Editor of the Dispatch: 
 
 In 1873-1874 the American owners of silver bullion were 
 denied the right of carrying it to the American mints, of having 
 it coined into the constitutional money of the United States, and 
 of putting it into circulation. This made it necessary to ship and 
 sell their silver abroad, and it was all sent to France and India, 
 where only it enjoyed the privilege of the mints. A similar policy 
 in Europe so crowded the French mints that France, about 1877 
 or 1878, had to close them to all silver except what was owned by 
 her own people. Thus American silver bullion could find no place 
 of coinage except in the royal mints of India (lately closed). 
 
 American silver, sent through London to India, was subjected 
 in London to so great a shave that the American producers of the 
 metal insisted upon some measure of protection from Congress, 
 who had denied them the right of free coinage. Congress accord- 
 ingly, in 1890, enacted as a make-shift for free coinage (I think the 
 Democratic platform calls it a base make-shift) the Sherman act. 
 
 THE SHERMAN ACT. 
 
 This act provided for the American owners of silver bullion a 
 
68 SOUND MONEY. 
 
 partial home market for their metal. It directed the purchase by 
 the Treasury, at the market price, of four and a half millions of 
 ounces of silver a month, fifty-four millions a year. It directed 
 that payment for it should be made in Treasury notes, redeemable 
 in gold or silver. The act was distasteful to the advocates of silver 
 money, because it still denied the right of free coinage at the 
 mints, and only substituted the privilege of selling a limited 
 quantity of this money metal for what it was Avorth merely as a 
 raw article of commerce. But the act, while perpetrating this 
 wrong, was of public service in requiring the monthly issue of 
 something less than four and a half millions of dollars of money 
 currency. 
 
 The gold powers concentrated in Wall street have never liked 
 this Sherman law, miserable dodge and make-shift as it was. They 
 did not like its furnishing even so limited a home market as it did 
 for the silver which it was their policy to proscribe. They did not 
 like its increasing the volume of American currency by as- much 
 as four millions of dollars a month. They objected to the elasticity 
 in the currency of the United States which this monthly issue of 
 new currency gave, and which had so strong an influence in pre- 
 venting corners in the money and produce markets. 
 
 REPEAL FORESEEN. 
 
 There has been a continual agitation against this Sherman law 
 ever since its enactment. During the last six months it has been 
 clearly demonstrated that the act would be repealed. All the 
 eastern newspapers and most of the western ; all the Chambers of 
 Commerce in the North, East, South and West have been induced 
 to pronounce against the act ; and finally Congress has been called 
 into extra session for the especial purpose of removing the fore- 
 doomed law from the statute-book. 
 
 The natural effect of this concerted and universal agitation and 
 of the certainity of its repeal has been an alarm about currency and 
 a fever for hoarding it. Currency, in view of the prospective stop- 
 page of the monthly replenishment of $4,000,000, has been hiding 
 itself away for several months, and thereby causing the suspension 
 of many solvent banks all over the country. The misfortune is 
 
SOUND MONEY. 69. 
 
 that bankruptcy has thus been forced, not only upon banks unde- 
 serving of confidence, but also upon banks in much larger num- 
 bers that were solvent, and were of great value and indispensable 
 use to the country. The currency famine resulting from the appre- 
 hended cessation in the issuing of §4,000,000 of new treasury notes 
 per month is the WHO that has killed cock-robin. 
 
 FOUR MILLIONS A MONTH. 
 
 We are expecting much general benefit, considerable ease in 
 business, marvellous restoration of confidence from the repeal of 
 a measure that gives us four millions of currency per month 
 in a currency famine. My own opinion is that the cutting off 
 of this supply will increase the currency famine now prevailing. 
 
 How shall the fifty or sixty millions of silver bullion which we 
 have each year to spare be utilized for the currency needs of the 
 American people ? A naked repeal of the Sherman aut cuts us off 
 from fifty millions of currency, which is absolutely necessary to 
 the business needs of the country. If this currency is to be denied 
 us - , manifestly the surplus silver it represents should be utilized by 
 a bill for free coinage. 
 
OUR LEGAL TENDER MONEY, 
 
 ANSWER TO THE QUESTION: IS THE SILVER DOLLAR 
 OF THE UNITED STATES LEGAL TENDER? 
 
 Norfolk, Ya., December 12th, 1893. 
 Dear : 
 
 Up to 1873, from the beginning of the American government, 
 and since 1878, the coined dollars of silver by the mints of the 
 United States have been legal tender for all amounts. The great 
 fraud of 1873 reduced them to legal tender for sums of $5.00 and 
 less only ; but the act of 1878 reinstated the silver dollar in its 
 constitutional functions. 
 
 The coined silver dollar of the United States is not only legal 
 tender all over the United States, but it passes current at par 
 (sometimes at a slight discount) all over Europe. We have four 
 legal tenders in the United States, viz : Our gold coins, our silver 
 dollars, our greenback notes, and, for subsidiary purposes, our 
 nickels and small silver coins. There is no single unit of value; 
 there can't be, because value is not mathematical, like length, 
 weight, &c, but relative, and is ever changing, not only in the at- 
 tempted unit itself, but in all property. The gold and bond bank- 
 ers are trying to make gold the only legal tender, but won't 
 succeed. They have forced the gold standard partially upon this 
 country, with the aid of Carlisle and Cleveland. Their object is 
 to make it practicable to corner gold, sometimes partially, sometimes 
 completely. Their success in this endeavor would pauperize man- 
 kind. The pauperizing process has already commenced. We 
 shall see very hard times. 
 
 The policy of gold and bond bankers in Lombard and Wall 
 Streets is gradually, step by step, to make gold the only legal 
 tender, as well in the LTnited States as in Europe. But the use 
 of silver, even in the gold basis countries of Europe, is a necessity. 
 In those countries, considered as a whole, there is as much legal 
 tender silver in circulation as gold, and as much legal tender paper 
 as either gold or silver. Nature and her great laws are stronger 
 
SOUND MONEY. 71 
 
 than men, stronger than the guilds of gold and bond bankers, 
 reinforced by Carlisle and Cleveland, the betrayers of the silver 
 cause in this country. 
 
 The gold and bond guilds do not expect to destroy the use of 
 silver as money. Their object is to discredit it as much as pos- 
 sible, and exclude it from use by bankers and dealers in bonds. 
 Their object is to have gold always so in hand as to be cornkrabte, 
 partially or completely, at their pleasure. They desire to be able 
 to apply the pauperizing process, whenever convenient and when- 
 ever prudent. 
 
 Thank God, however, the silver dollar of America is still legal 
 tender. If it were not, the member of the House of Delegates 
 who made the bet with you would be gathering acorns for hogs 
 somewhere in our pauperized country, relapsed into barbarism. 
 
 We continually hear of the " fifty-cent dollar." There is no 
 such thing in existence. The American silver dollar will buy the 
 microbe gold dollar anywhere in the United States. It will buy it 
 because it is a dollar, just as much so as its little mulatto counter- 
 part. The two are dollars by the same right and title — that is to 
 say, by the fiat ot the Constitution and laws of the United States. 
 
 LEGAL TENDER AT HOME. 
 
 That Constitution established a " Government of the United 
 States," and called it a "government." It is not only a govern- 
 ment, but it is the only government in this country that has the 
 character of nationality, and possesses the prerogative of determin- 
 ing the unit of values here. The States of which it is composed 
 are incompetent to declare Avhat is money or to regulate its value. 
 "Whatever power there is over the currency is vested in Congress. 
 If the power to declare what is money is not in Congress, it is 
 annihilated. The court in Legal Tender Cases, 12 Wall, 545. 
 " The power to determine what shall be lawful money and a legal 
 tender is, in its nature and of necessity, a governmental power. It 
 is in all countries exercised by the government. In the United 
 States, so far as it relates to the precious metals, it is vested in 
 Congress by the power to coin money." Chase, Chief Justice, for 
 the Supreme Court in Hepburn vs. Greswold, 8 Wall, 615. Mr. 
 Webster, though contending that paper notes could not be made 
 legal tender, in which respect he has been overruled bj T the 
 
72 SOUND MONEY. 
 
 Supreme Court, yet held it to be indisputable that " the legal ten- 
 der in this country is gold and silver — either the coinage of our 
 own mints or foreign coins at rates regulated by Congress. Con- 
 gress," he continues, " has exercised this power fully in both its 
 branches It has coined money, and still coins it; it has regulated 
 the value of foreign coin, and still regulates it. The legal tender, 
 therefore, the constitutional standard of value, is established and 
 cannot be overthrown. To overthrow it would shake the whole 
 system of government." 4 Webster's Works, 271. 
 
 From the fact that the government of the United States is a 
 government of sovereign power in respect to money ; that the 
 States are prohibited from making aught but gold and silver legal 
 tender, as coined or appraised in value by authority of the United 
 States Government ; that Congress is empowered by the Constitu- 
 tion to coin money and regulate the value thereof and of foreign 
 coins ; that Congress has established from the beginning of its 
 being the American silver dollar as the unit of value and of ac- 
 counts in the United States, it follows that this dollar is worth par, 
 is par, without any reference to the question whether the silver in 
 it would buy, if in the form of metal, eighty or a hundred, or a 
 hundred and twenty, or a half bushel of copper cents. 
 
 If there were no supreme power in the land endowed with the 
 prerogative of declaring what, shall be the unit of value, there 
 could be no certainty in contracts, and these would be governed 
 by the fickle sanction of voluntary consensus which itself would 
 lack the essential element of coercive validity. Legal tender marks 
 the line between purchase and barter, between the price of civiliza- 
 tion and the swap of barbarism. This unit may have a mere imag- 
 inary existence and value ; it may be of paper ; it may be of metal ; 
 indeed, it may not exist at all. How many bankers in Lombard 
 or Wall Street know that their ante-t}-pes for generations never 
 saw a pound sterling coin — the fetich which they worship with 
 heart and soul, mind and strength, might and main ? There never 
 were any such coins until 1815, if we except a few struck in the 
 reign of Henry the VIII ; yet this pound sterling has been the 
 unit of British currency for generations past. Length is material 
 and can be measured. Weight is material and can be ascertained 
 by scales ; and if allowed to drop, will mash your toes. But value 
 is an ideal thing. The coinage acts of Congress fix its unit in our 
 
SOUND MONEY. 73 
 
 country as a dollar. If the weight and composition of this unit be 
 but fixed by congressional prerogative there might be no piece 
 actually coined of the denomination of the dollar. See the re- 
 marks of the court to this effect in Legal Tender Cases, 12 Wall, 
 553. 
 
 What, then, makes the piece of silver coin under consideration 
 a dollar ? It is the fiat of the government, exercised bv authority 
 of the national Constitution in the performance of a necessary 
 functional duty, devolved solely, absolutely and autocratically upon 
 itself as the supreme government of the United States. 
 
 INTRINSIC VALUE NON-ESSENTIAL. 
 
 There is a swarm of money dealers in Loudon who say that our 
 American dollar is not an honest one, and therefore a larger swarm 
 of Americans here who echo their words; but the American Con- 
 gress, from the great one which convened in 1789 fresh from the 
 battle-fields of the war for American independence, and all its suc- 
 cessors down to the present time, have said that this silver coin, 
 bearing the indellible stamp of the American eagle upon its face, 
 is and shall be the dollar of the United States. 
 
 What influence the possession of intrinsic value may have had 
 on Congress in fixing upon the form, weight and composition of 
 this unit dollar is immaterial. Congress was exercising a prerog- 
 ative duty, and having exercised it, the dollar became the legal 
 basis of every contract, irrespectively of the value of the metal 
 out of which it was formed, if melted into shapeless mass. 
 
 At a later period, that is to say, in 1862, so completely and ut- 
 terly did Congress disregard the feature of intrinsic value, that it 
 issued a hundred and fifty millions of dollars of Treasury notes, 
 and affixed the legal tender function to them all. This was done 
 in the depth and gloom of sectional war. After the war was over 
 there was great screaming and cawing and flapping of wings 
 among the financial rooks of Boston and New York over the le^al 
 tender attribute possessed by these notes, and representative bank- 
 ers brought suits to put a quietus upon the pretension that they 
 possessed it ; but the Supreme Court of the United States, after as 
 full argument and as mature deliberation as ever was given to a 
 subject by that authoritative body, ratified the action of Congress, 
 and decided that legal tender money ordained as such by Congress, 
 need not have anv intrinsic value whatever. 
 
74 SOUND MONEY. 
 
 Against the clamor of the class Avho were raising Cain over 
 these legal tender notes the Court quoted the resolution adopted 
 by the Continental Congress of 1777, during its desperate struggle 
 with Tories and cockneys in red coats, declaring that Continental 
 bills, issued in maintenance of the army, ought to pass current in 
 all payments, and be deemed equal in value to the same nominal 
 sums in Spanish dollars, and that any one refusing to receive them 
 " ought to be deemed an enemy of the liberties of the United 
 States," and calling upon the State Legislatures to pass laws to 
 that effect. 
 
 It is as true now as it was in 1777, that when Congress has 
 exerciced its bounden and necessary duty to the country, of declar- 
 ing what shall be the unit of currency in the United States it is 
 moral Icesa majestas to decry that unit; and if words could, like 
 overt acts, be prosecuted as treason in this country, those who use 
 them clamorously and maliciously, would deserve to be dealt with 
 criminally, and in periods of public danger " shot upon the spot." 
 
 OUR DOLLAR WORTH PAR INTRINSICALLY. 
 
 But aside from these latter considerations, is the silver dollar of 
 Congress wanting in intrinsic value ? 
 
 If the value of the metal in this coin be measured by its cost, 
 the average cost of the dollars in existence so far from being only 
 50 cents each, is not less than 250 cents. The statistics of silver- 
 mining show that, taking all mining ventures into account, there 
 have been more than $3 expended in the business for every dollar 
 that has been realized from it. Even the mines that have survived 
 bankruptcy and that are in more or less profitable operation, do 
 not show themselves to be bonanzas in the matter of profits. The 
 Superintendent of the mint reports the cost of conducting the 
 successful silver mines in the United States in the year 1890 to 
 have been 66 cents for every dollar mined. 
 
 Measured by the cost, and taking into account onty the operated 
 mines of the two Americas, statistics show that the cost of all 
 the silver obtained has approximated 100 per cent, of the value of 
 the metal vielded by the mines. 
 
 Yours, 
 
 Ro. W. Hughes. 
 
Property Values and Free Silver, 
 
 Richmond, Ya 
 
 To the Editor of the Dispatch : 
 
 In a former letter to the Dispatch I quoted the Atlanta Consti- 
 tution to prove that property valuations for the year 1894 showed 
 an increase over 1893 of 8338,000,000 in the three States of Massa- 
 chusetts, New York and Pennsylvania, while in thirty-one Southern 
 and Western States a decrease of more than 8500,000,000 had 
 taken place in the same year. Of the increase in the three States 
 named more than 70 per cent, had occurred in the State of New 
 York. An examination of the last census reports will satisfy the 
 most casual reader that this absorption of the wealth of the coun- 
 try by the three States named has been going on regularly, and 
 with constantly -increasing ratio since the demonetization of silver. 
 Where it will end, unless we retrace our steps, no man can tell. 
 
 During the decade from 1880 to 1890, property in Massachusetts, 
 New York and Pennsylvania increased in value, in round numbers, 
 $2,600,000,000; while like values in the twelve States— Maryland, 
 Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Ala- 
 bama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Tennessee and West Virginia 
 — increased during the same decade only $800,000,000, or less 
 than one-third of the increase in the three first-named. In New 
 York alone the increase was $300,000,000 more than in the twelve 
 Southern States combined. In Pennsylvania alone $100,000,000 
 more than in the twelve Southern States combined. 
 
 Remember that this process, as I have said, has been going on 
 with increasing ratio, until, as the Atlanta Constitution proves, in a 
 single year — 1893 — there was an almost uniform decrease in the 
 South and West amounting to more than 8500,000,000, while in 
 New York alone there was an increase of considerably more than 
 $200,000,000. 
 
76 SOUND MONEY. 
 
 So much for ten years of our experience with the gold standard. 
 Where will it end? 
 
 The same census reports show that in the South the number of 
 landowners is decreasing year after year, while the number of 
 tenants is on the increase. Millionaires on both sides of the ocean 
 are purchasing immense tracts of Southern and Western lands, 
 equal in extent in some instances to counties ; building magnificent 
 palaces, which are guarded by retainers, some of whom are paid 
 more than the Governor of Virginia, while men whose names for 
 a century have been household words in the South are glad to get 
 positions on the plantations they once owned. Are we drifting 
 back to the feudal system? Are the descendants of the Custises, 
 of Marshall, of Jefferson, of Patrick Henry, of Lee, Jackson, 
 Stuart and Hill, to be the retainers of the Vanderbilts, the Goulds, 
 the Astors, and the Rothschilds? 
 
 Respectfully yours, 
 
 Charles P. Latham. 
 
Platform of the Cook Coimtu Democracy 
 
 THE GREATEST QUESTION EVER UP BEFORE A FREE 
 PEOPLE FOR CONSIDERATION. 
 
 The Democratic party in its National Conventions and the 
 Democracy of Illinois have uniformly declared in favor of the use 
 of both gold and silver standard money of the country. 
 
 Silver and gold have constituted the money of the Democratic 
 party, the money of the American people and the money of the 
 whole commercial world. It was by the use of both that the 
 world progressed and that our people prospered. 
 
 As long as the mints of the world, or even of one great nation, 
 remained open to the free coinage of both metals, silver and gold, 
 in obedience to natural law, maintained a substantial parity. 
 
 That law is that the privilege of coining either metal into debt 
 paying money makes a demand for whichever metal tends to be 
 the cheaper. This natural demand increases the value of the 
 cheaper metal and the lack of demand decreases the value of the 
 dearer metal, and thus an automatic and natural stability of the 
 dearer metal is obtained. This is not theory, it is the history of 
 centuries, and this natural law maintained the parity of gold and 
 silver at substantiallv their coinage ratio, even when the ratio of 
 their productions fluctuated violently. When the world's produc- 
 tion of gold was three times that of silver, and when again it was 
 only one-third of silver, still the bullion value of the metals under 
 free coinage was relatively the same. 
 
 Not until silver was denied free coinage at the mints did its 
 value and that of gold begin to diverge, and we mean that the 
 apparent depreciation of silver is really to a great extent the ap- 
 preciation of gold. Gold has become clearer because the immense 
 
78 SOUND MONEY. 
 
 added demand for gold, consequent upon the demonetization of 
 silver, has made it dearer. This is evidenced bv the increased 
 purchasing power of gold and the general decline of the prices of 
 commodities since 1873. There never has been and is not now 
 enough gold in the world to do the business of the world. The 
 total amount in existence is less than $480,000,000, and amounts to 
 only about $2.50 per capita for the population of the world. 
 
 To make any single metal the standard of value is to choose a 
 standard which must fluctuate in obedience to the laws of supply 
 and demand. Gold monometalism and silver monometalism are 
 fraught with peculiar dangers, because their burdens fall on those 
 who are least able to endure them. Bimetalism furnishes a stan- 
 dard more stable than any other, because each of the two metals 
 systematically prevents or counteracts the undue appreciation of 
 the other. The gold standard is dishonest and oppressive, because 
 gold tends steadily upwards and makes the debtor pay more than 
 he owes. Upon the Republican party rests the responsibility of 
 the closing of our mints to silver and the practical supremacy of 
 gold monometalism, and we adjure its members in the name of 
 patriotism and humanity, to forsake their false guides and to join 
 with us in prompt and thorough-going measures to correct the 
 evil which they have brought into existence, and to return to the 
 double standard approved by Hamilton and Jefferson. 
 
 There are other abuses of the currency system which must also 
 be removed until we stand upon the firm foundation of the pre- 
 cious metals as the basis of our money system, every dollar of 
 equal intrinsic worth, and no money founded upon mere promises 
 to pay not backed by gold and silver. 
 
 We deny the statement of our adversaries that we favor repu- 
 diation, or 50-cent dollars, and insist that by the operation of the 
 natural law of supply and demand the gold and silver dollars, 
 when freely coined at the ratio of 16 to 1, will adjust themselves 
 at a practical equality, just as they did before 1873. 
 
 There is not and never has been in the United States a 50-cent 
 silver dollar, and the only reason that the bullion in a silver dollar 
 can be said to be worth 50 cents is because that bullion has been 
 excluded from the mints and is unfairly compared with appreciated 
 gold. 
 
SOUND MONEY. 79 
 
 We are not opposed to an international agreement. We invite 
 such action, but we are opposed to waiting one day or one hour 
 for foreign aid. International conferences have heretofore been a 
 failure, whether well-intended or conceived in the interest of delav. 
 We believe that this nation can and should legislate for its own 
 people. 
 
 Therefore, be it resolved by the Democracy of Cook county that 
 we demand the immediate restoration of the free and unlimited 
 coinage of silver at the ratio of 16 to 1, as it existed prior to 1873, 
 without waiting for the aid or consent of any other nation, such 
 gold and silver coin to be the legal tender for all debts, public and 
 private. 
 
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