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If Not Silver, What? 
 
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IF NOT SILYER 
 WHAT? 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN W. BOOKW ALTER 
 
 SPRINGFIELD, OHIO 
 1896 
 
COPTEIGHT, 1896, BT I 
 
 JOHN W. BOOKWALTER 
 
 Press of J. J. Little & Co. 
 Astor Place, New York 
 
"If you will show me a system which gives absolute 
 permanence, I will take it in preference to any other. But 
 of all conceivable systems of currency, that system is as- 
 suredly the worst which gives you a standard steadily, 
 continuously, indefinitely appreciating, and which, by that 
 very fact, throws a burden upon every man of enterprise, 
 upon every man who desires to promote the agricultural or 
 the industrial resources of the country, and benefits no 
 human being whatever but the owner of fixed debts in 
 gold." — Speech of the Right Hon. A. J. Balpoub, at 
 Manchester, England, October 27, 1892. 
 
As a manufacturer and somewhat extensive 
 land owner I have a great personal interest in 
 the money question. As a traveller I have 
 studied the situation in other nations, and thus, 
 I may modestly say, have enjoyed the great 
 advantage of getting a view in no wise disturbed 
 by partisan politics. As one whose prosperity 
 depends almost entirely upon that of the farmers, 
 I have naturally thought most of the effect mono- 
 metallism has had, and will continue to have, 
 upon them. I have, in a sense, been compelled 
 to think much on this great issue. These facts 
 are my apology, if any apology is needed, for giv- 
 ing my thoughts to the public. But is any 
 apology needed ? Providence has granted to a 
 few the leisure and the opportunity to study these 
 economic problems, on the correct solution of 
 which the welfare of millions, whose toil leaves 
 them little leisure for study, depends. Is it not 
 the supreme moral duty of those few to give their 
 conclusions to the public ? I have always thought 
 so, and in that spirit I present this little work, 
 and ask the laboring producers to give a candid 
 consideration to the views herein presented. It 
 
may be that some of these views will be success- 
 fully controverted, but the duty remains the 
 same. If they should aid in arriving at a correct 
 solution of the great problem, though the solution 
 be different from that I have indicated, I shall be 
 many times repaid for my labor. 
 
 John W. Bookwalxeb. 
 
 Springfield, Ohio, August 5, 1896. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 Objections to Silver, and Comments theeeon, 1 
 
 Demonetization op Gold, 35 
 
 Kelative Production op Gold and Silver, . 49 
 
 Is Bimetallism Practicable? .... 71 
 
 Bimetallism Abroad, 89 
 
 The "Dump" op Silver, 116 
 
 Asia's Demand por the Precious Metals, . 123 
 
IF NOT SILYER, WHAT? 
 
 OBJECTIONS TO SILVER, AND COM- 
 MENTS THEEEON. 
 
 Silver is too bulky for use in large 
 sums. 
 
 That objection is obsolete. We do not now 
 carry coin ; we carry its paper representatives, 
 those issued by government being absolutely 
 secured. This combines all the advantage of coin, 
 bank paper, and the proposed fiat money. A 
 silver certificate for $500 weighs less than a gold 
 dollar. In that denomination the Jay Gould 
 estate could be carried by one man. 
 
 But silver certificates would not remain 
 at par. 
 
 At par with what ? Everything in the universe 
 is at par with itself. The volume of certificates 
 
2 IF NOT SILVER, WHAT? 
 
 issued by the government -would be exactly the 
 amount of the metal deposited, and that amount 
 could never be suddenly increased or diminished, 
 for the product of the mines in any one year is 
 very seldom more than three per cent, of the stock 
 already on hand, and half of that is used in the 
 arts. It is self-evident, therefore, that such cer- 
 tificates would be many times more stable in value 
 than any form of bank paper yet devised. 
 
 Gold would go out of circulation. 
 
 It has already gone out. Under the present 
 policy of the government we have all the disad- 
 vantages of both systems and the advantages of 
 neither, with the added element of chronic uncer- 
 tainty and an artificial scare gotten up for political 
 purposes. 
 
 And that very scare shows an impor- 
 tant fact which you silverites ought to 
 heed — that nearly all the bankers and 
 heavy moneyed men are opposed to free 
 coinage. 
 
 Nearly all the slaveholders were opposed to 
 emancipation. All the landlords in Great Britain 
 were opposed to the abolition of the Corn Laws, 
 
OBJECTIONS TO SILVER. 3 
 
 and all the silversmiths of Ephesus were violently 
 opposed to the "agitation" started by St. Paul. 
 And what of it ? The silversmiths were honest 
 enough to admit the cause of their opposition 
 (Acts xix. 24, 28), but these fellows are not. The 
 Ephesians got up a riot; these fellows get up 
 panics. " Have ye not read that when the devil 
 goeth out of a man then it teareth him ? " 
 
 But are not bankers and other men who 
 handle money as a business better quali- 
 fied than other people to judge of the 
 proper metal ? 
 
 Certainly not. On the contrary, they are for 
 many reasons much less competent, as experience 
 has repeatedly shown. All students of social science 
 know, indeed all close observers know, that those 
 who do the routine work in any vocation seldom 
 form comprehensive views of it, and those who 
 manage the details of a business are very rarely 
 indeed able to master the higher philosophy 
 thereof. This is a general truth applicable to all 
 vocations except those, like law, in which a mas- 
 tery of the science is a necessity for conducting 
 the details. Experts in details often make the 
 worst blunders in general management. Nearly 
 
4 IF NOT SILTEE, WHAT? 
 
 all the inventions of perpetual motion come from 
 practical mechanics. Nearly all the crazy designs 
 in motors come from engineers. The educational 
 schemes of truly colossal absurdity come mostly 
 from teachers ; all the quack nostrums and elixirs 
 to "restore lost manhood "are invented by doc- 
 tors, and nearly all the crazy religions are started 
 by preachers. 
 
 On the other hand, three-fourths of the great 
 inventions have been by men who did not work at 
 the business they improved. The world's great 
 financiers have not been bankers. Alexander 
 Hamilton was not a banker. Neither was Albert 
 Gallatin, nor Eobert J. Walker, nor James 
 Guthrie, nor Salmon P. Chase. William Patter- 
 son, who founded the Bank of England, was a 
 sailor and trader ; and of the British Chancellors 
 of the Exchequer whose names shine in history, 
 scarcely one was a banker. One of Christ's disci- 
 ples was a banker, and the end of his scientific 
 financiering is reported in Acts i. 18. Jobn Law 
 also, whose very name is a synonym for foolish 
 financial schemes, was a banker, and a very suc- 
 cessful one. Where was there ever a crazier 
 scheme than the so-called " Baltimore Plan," ex- 
 clusively the work of bankers ? 
 
OBJECTIONS TO SILVEK. 5 
 
 But as the bankers and great capitalists 
 have no faith in it, the free coinage of sil- 
 ver would certainly precipitate a panic. 
 
 The gold basis has already precipitated several 
 panics. Even in so conservative a conn try as 
 England they have, since adopting monometal- 
 lism, had a severe currency panic every four years, 
 and a great industrial depression on an average 
 once in seven years. The only reason we have 
 not done worse is that the rapid development of 
 the natural resources of the country saves us from 
 the consequences of our folly. We draw on the 
 future, and in no long time it honors our drafts. 
 Nevertheless, in the twenty-three years since silver 
 was demonetized we have had two grand panics, 
 several minor currency panics, hundreds of thou- 
 ands of bankruptcies with liabilities of billions, 
 and five labor wars in which 900 persons were 
 killed and $230,000,000 worth of property de- 
 stroyed. Could a silver basis do worse ? 
 
 You admit, then, that the immediate 
 adoption of free coinage would, for a while 
 at least, drive gold abroad ? 
 
 And what then ? Why do the gold men always 
 stop with that statement and so carefully avoid 
 
6 IP NOT SILVER, WHAT? 
 
 inquiry into what would follow ? Let us look into 
 it. We may have in this country $500,000,000 
 in gold, though no one can tell where it is. As- 
 suming that free coinage would send it all abroad, 
 the inevitable result would be a gold inflation in 
 Europe, which would cause a rise in prices. I 
 observe that of late the gold organs have been 
 denying this — denying, in fact, the quantitative 
 principle in finance, something never denied be- 
 fore this discussion arose. It is too true, as some 
 philosopher has said, that if a property interest 
 depended on it, there would soon be plenty of able 
 men to deny the law of gravitation. But as the 
 men who deny it in one breath admit it in the next 
 by assuring us that we shall soon have a great in- 
 crease in the production of gold, and that prices 
 will therefore rise, we may with confidence adhere 
 to the established truth of political economy. 
 
 Sending our gold to Europe, then, would raise 
 prices there, which would raise the price of our 
 staple exports, such as wheat, meat, and cotton ; 
 the great rise in the price of these would, of 
 course, stimulate exports, and thus aid us in 
 maintaining a favorable balance, would restore to 
 the farmers that income which they have lost by 
 the decline of prices, would thus put into their 
 
OBJECTIONS TO SILVER. 7 
 
 hands the power to buy manufactured goods and 
 to pay our annual interest debt to Europe by com- 
 modities instead of gold. In short, if the gold 
 went abroad, it would necessarily be but a short 
 time till much of it would come back to pay for 
 our agricultural exports, and at the same time our 
 farmers would get the benefit of higher prices by 
 both operations. If any man doubts that an in- 
 creased gold supply in Europe would increase the 
 selling price of oar farm surplus, I ask him to 
 examine the figures for the twelve years following 
 the discovery of gold in California, or the history 
 of prices in the century following the discovery of 
 America — an era described by all economists as 
 one of inflation. Is there any reason why a like 
 cause should not now produce like effects ? 
 
 In the meantime, however, all the other 
 nations would dump their silver upon us 
 and we should be overloaded with it. 
 
 Where would the silver come from ? The best 
 authorities agree that there is not enough free 
 silver in the world to even fill the place of our 
 gold, which, you say, would be expelled. And 
 right here is where the advocates of the gold 
 standard contradict every well-established princi- 
 
8 IF NOT SILVER, WHAT? 
 
 pie of political economy, and every lesson of ex- 
 perience, by declaring that the transfer of all our 
 gold to Europe would not cheapen it there, and 
 that free coinage would not increase the value of 
 silver. They insist that we should still hare 
 "50-cent dollars." Stripped of all its fine gar- 
 niture of rhetoric, their proposition simply 
 amounts to this : The sudden addition of 20 
 per cent, to Europe's supply of gold would not 
 cheapen it, and making a market here for all the 
 free silver in the world would not raise its value ; 
 laying the burden of sustaining an enormous mass 
 of credit currency on one metal instead of two has 
 added nothing to the value of that metal ; a thirty 
 years' war on the other metal was not the cause of 
 its depreciation in terms of gold, and if the con- 
 ditions were reversed, greatly increasing the de- 
 mand for silver and decreasing the demand for 
 gold, they would remain in relative values just the 
 same. If those propositions are true, all political 
 economy is false. 
 
 Government cannot create values, in silver 
 or anything else. 
 
 You have seen it done fifty times if you are as 
 old as I. During the war, government once raised 
 
OBJECTIONS TO SILVER. 9 
 
 the price of horses $20 per head in a single day. 
 On a certain day the land in the Platte Valley, for 
 perhaps one hundred miles west of Omaha, was 
 worth preemption price ; the next day it was 
 worth much more, and in a year three or four 
 times as much. Government had authorized the 
 construction of the Union Pacific Eailroad, and 
 hefore a single spade of earth was turned, millions 
 of dollars in value had been added to the land. It 
 had created a new use for the land. Value inheres 
 in use when the thing used can be bought and sold. 
 Whatever creates a use creates value, and a great 
 increase in use forces an increase in value, pro- 
 vided that the supply does not increase equally fast ; 
 and with silver that is an impossibility. If you 
 think government cannot add value to a metal, 
 consider this conundrum : What would be the 
 present value of gold if all nations should de- 
 monetize it ? It can be calculated approximately. 
 There is on hand enough gold to supply the arts 
 for forty years at the present rate of consumption. 
 What, then, is the present value of a commodity 
 of which the world has forty years' supply on hand 
 and all prepared for immediate use ? 
 
 Take notice, also, that in the decade 1850-60 
 Germany, Austria, and Belgium completely de- 
 
10 IF NOT SILVER, WHAT? 
 
 monetized gold, and Holland and Portugal par- 
 tially did so, thus depriving it of its legal tender 
 quality among 70,000,000 people, and that this 
 added yery greatly to its then depression. 
 
 Free coinage would bring us to a silver 
 basis, and that would take us out of the list 
 of superior nations, and put us on the grade 
 of the low-civilization countries. 
 
 That is, I presume, we should become as dirty 
 as the Chinese, and as unprogressive as the Cen- 
 tral Americans, agnostics like the Japanese, and 
 revolutionary like the Peruvians. And, by a 
 parity of reasoning, the gold standard will make 
 us as fanatical as the Turks, as superstitious as 
 the Spaniards, and as hot-tempered and revenge- 
 ful as the Moors. If not, why not ? They all 
 have the gold standard. You may say that this 
 answer is foolish, and I don't think much of it 
 myself, but it is strictly according to Scripture 
 (Proverbs xxv. 5). The retort is on a par with 
 the proposition, and both are claptrap. The 
 progress of nations and their rank in civilization 
 depend on causes quite aside from the metal basis 
 of their money. 
 
 We must remember that for many years after 
 
OBJECTIONS TO SILVER. 11 
 
 the establishment of the Mint we had in this 
 country little or no coin in circulation except 
 silver, and were just as much on a silver basis 
 then as Mexico is now. Were our forefathers, 
 then, inferior to us, or on a par with the Mexicans 
 and Chinamen of the present day ? Even down 
 to 1840 the silver in circulation greatly exceeded 
 the gold in amount. 
 
 By the way, where do you goldites get the fig- 
 ures to justify you in creating the impression on 
 the public mind that Mexico and the Central and 
 South American States are overloaded with silver, 
 having a big surplus which we are in danger of 
 having " dumped " on us ? Didn't you know 
 that they are really suffering from a scarcity of 
 silver ? that altogether they have not a sixth of 
 what we have ? One who judged from goldite 
 talk only, would conclude that silver is a burden 
 in those countries, that they have to carry it 
 about in hods. Now what are the facts ? 
 
 In all the Spanish American States there are 
 60,000,000 people, and they have a little less than 
 $100,000,000 in silver. Not $2 per capita ! This 
 is a startling statement, I know, but it is official, 
 and you will find it in the last report of the Direc- 
 tor of the Mint (1895). The South American 
 
12 IF NOT SILVER, WHAT? 
 
 States have but 83 cents per capita in silver, and 
 Mexico has but $4.50. With a population nearly 
 twice that of Great Britain, they have much less 
 silver, and less than half of that of Germany, 
 though having a much larger population. In 
 fact, to give the Spanish American nations as 
 large a silver circulation per capita as the average 
 of England, France and Germany, they must 
 needs have nearly $300,000,000 more, or nearly 
 three times as much as they now have. It looks 
 very much as if the " dump " would have to be 
 the other way. 
 
 Prom these figures it would seem that the 
 trouble, if monometallists are right in saying there 
 is trouble there, is due not to their having too 
 much silver, but that they do not have enough. 
 Not having enough, they have followed the usual 
 course of nations lacking a sufficient coin basis, 
 and have issued a great volume of irredeemable 
 paper money. By reference to the authority 
 above cited, you will find that they have in cir- 
 ciilation $560,000,000 in paper money. One fourth 
 of all the uncovered paper in the world is in those 
 countries, though their total population is less 
 than that of the United States. Who will say 
 that it will be a calamity to them to coin $200,- 
 
OBJECTIONS TO SliVEK. 13 
 
 000,000 more in silver and retire that much of 
 their uncovered paper ? 
 
 Gold ought to be the standard metal, be- 
 cause, apart from its use as money, it has a 
 fixed intrinsic value. 
 
 There is no such thing as intrinsic value. Qual- 
 ities are intrinsic ; value is a relation between ex- 
 changeable commodities, and, in the eternal nat- 
 ure of things, never can be invariable. Value is 
 of the mind ; it is the estimate placed upon a 
 salable article by those able and willing to buy it. 
 I have seen water sell on the Sahara at two francs 
 a bucketful. Was that its intrinsic value ? If 
 so, what is its intrinsic value on Lake Superior ? 
 
 Well, if what you say be true, there is no 
 intrinsic value in any of the precious metals, 
 and we cannot have an invariable standard 
 of value at all. 
 
 No more than an invariable standard of friend- 
 ship or love. Value is, in fact, a purely ideal rela- 
 tion. All this talk about an invariable dollar which 
 shall be-like the bushel measure or the yard stick is 
 the merest claptrap. The fact that gold men stoop 
 to such language goes far to prove that their con- 
 
14 IF NOT SILVER, WHAT? 
 
 tention is wrong. The argument violates the very 
 first principle of mental philosophy, in that it ap- 
 plies the fixed relations of space, weight, and time 
 to the operations of the mind. Would you say a 
 bushel of discontent or eighteen inches of friend- 
 ship ? Men who compare the dollar to the pound 
 weight or yard stick are talking just that unscien- 
 tifically. Invariable value being an impossibility, 
 and an invariable standard of value a correlative 
 impossibility, all we can do is to select those com- 
 modities which vary the least and use them as a 
 measure for other things ; but you will not find in 
 any economic writer that any metal is a fixed stan- 
 dard. And this brings me to consider that singu- 
 lar piece of folly which furnishes the basis of so 
 much monometallist literature, namely, that gold 
 is less variable in value than silver, and that one 
 metal as a basis varies less than two. Some of our 
 statesmen have got themselves into such a condition 
 of mind on this point as to really believe that, while 
 all other products of human labor are changing in 
 value, gold alone is gifted with the great attribute 
 of God — immutability. It is sheer blasphemy. It 
 is conclusively proved, and by many different lines 
 of reasoning, that silver is many times more stable 
 in value than gold. 
 
OBJECTIONS TO SILVER 15 
 
 I never heard such a proposition in my life ! 
 How on earth can it be proved that silver, as 
 things now stand, has not changed in value 
 more than gold ? 
 
 By the simplest of all processes. If we were in 
 a mining country, I could easily prove it to you by 
 the observed facts of geology, mineralogy, and me- 
 tallurgy ; but that is perhaps too remote and scien- 
 tific, so we will take the range of prices since silver 
 was demonetized. Of course you have seen the 
 various tables, such as Soetbeer's and Mulhall's. 
 Take their figures, or, better still, take those of the 
 United States Statistical Abstract, and you will 
 find the following facts demonstrated : 
 
 In February, 1873, a ten-ounce bar of uncoined 
 silver sold in New York city for $13 in gold, or 
 $14. 82 in greenbacks. To-day the ten-ounce bar 
 sells there for $6.90. 
 
 "Awful depreciation," isn't it ? " Debased 
 money," and all that sort of thing. But hold on. 
 Let us see how it is with other things. For prices 
 in the first half of 1873 we will take the United 
 States Abstract, and for present prices to-day's 
 issue of the New York Tribune. Wheat then was 
 $1.40 in New York city, so our silver bar would 
 have brought ten and four-sevenths bushels ; to-day 
 
16 IP NOT SILVER, WHAT? 
 
 wheat is " unsteady " in the near neighborhood 
 of 64 cents, and our silver bar -would buy ten and 
 five-sixths bushels. No. 2 red is the standard in 
 both cases. 
 
 Going through a long list in the same manner, 
 we find that the ten-ounce bar of uncoined silver 
 would buy in '73, in New York city, twenty-three 
 and a half bushels of corn, to-day twenty-four 
 bushels ; of cotton then eighty pounds, to-day 
 eighty-six pounds — and there is " a great specula- 
 tive boom in cotton/' and has been for some time, 
 but on the average price of this year silver would 
 buy much more. Of rye, then about fifteen bush- 
 els (grading not well settled), to-day thirteen bush- 
 els ; of bar iron then 310 pounds, to-day 460 
 pounds, and so on through the market. In the 
 Central West in 1873 it would have taken ten such 
 silver bars to buy a standard farm horse, Clydes- 
 dale or Percheron-Norman. 
 
 Will it take anymore bars to-day at $6.90 each ? 
 
 There is another way to calculate the decline, 
 and that is by taking the average farm value in- 
 stead of the export or New York city price, and in- 
 cluding all roots and garden products not exported, 
 and this makes the showing far more favorable to 
 silver. The Agricultural Department at Washing- 
 
OBJECTIONS TO SILVER. 17 
 
 ton has recently issued a pamphlet showing the 
 crops of every year since 1870, and the average home 
 or farm price, together with the total for which the 
 whole crop was sold. Send for it and contrast the 
 prices given in it with those known to you to-day, 
 and you will find that in rye, barley, oats, potatoes, 
 and many other things the decline has been very 
 much greater than is given above. In short, it 
 takes more farm produce to buy an ounce of silver 
 than it did in 1873, and twice as much to buy an 
 ounce of gold. Of Ohio medium scoured wool, for 
 instance — and that is the standard wool of the 
 market — it would have taken in 1873 two and a 
 half pounds to have bought an ounce of silver, 
 while to-day it will take considerably over three 
 pounds. The monometallists habitually talk, and 
 have talked it so long that they believe it them- 
 selves, as if silver had become so cheap that the 
 farmer ought to rank it with tin, lead, or spelter ; 
 but if the farmer will try the experiment he will 
 find that it takes a good deal more of his product 
 to buy a given amount of silver than it did in 1873. 
 The plain truth of the matter is that the time 
 has come for both gold and silver to increase in 
 purchasing power ; but by reason of demonetiza- 
 tion almost the entire increase has been concen- 
 2 
 
18 tf NOT SILVER, WHAT? 
 
 trated in gold, leaving silver almost stationary as 
 to commodities in general, but somewhat enhanced 
 as to farm products. In the name of common 
 honesty, is it not a high-handed outrage to make 
 the old debts of that period payable in the rapidly 
 appreciating metal, instead of one that has merely 
 retained its value ? and is it not hypocrisy to speak 
 of such a system as " honest money/' and afEect 
 to deplore the dishonesty of those who insist upon 
 their right to pay in the least variable metal, 
 which was constitutional and the unit of our 
 money from the very start ? 
 
 We certainly do want to pay our debts in 
 honest money. 
 
 Gospel truth ! And there is but one kind of 
 perfectly honest money — that which will give the 
 creditor an equivalent in commodities for what he 
 could have bought with the money he loaned. 
 Surely no honest man will pretend that gold to- 
 day does that. At this point we must admit the 
 painful truth that, in that sense, there is no per- 
 fectly honest money, that is, no money that does 
 not change somewhat in purchasing power ; and 
 how to remedy this has been the great problem 
 with the greatest minds among financiers — with 
 
OBJECTIONS TO SILVER. 19 
 
 all financiers, in fact, who are more anxious for 
 justice than greedy of gain. But surely there 
 should not be added to an innate variability that 
 much greater variability due to the mischievous 
 interference of interested parties, through the 
 power of the government. And herein is made 
 manifest the reckless folly of the gold men in 
 fighting against the soundest conclusions of science 
 and honesty, in striving for a standard of one 
 metal allowing the greatest variation, instead of 
 two which by varying in different directions might 
 counteract each other. 
 
 Gold alone has varied in production in this cen- 
 tury from $15,000,000 to $150,000,000 per year, 
 or tenfold ; but gold and silver combined have 
 never varied more than sixfold. It is self evident, 
 therefore, that the two combined form a much 
 more stable mass than gold alone, and it cannot 
 be too often repeated that the great desideratum 
 in money, the one quality more important than 
 all others, is stability in value, to the end that a 
 dollar or pound or franc may command as nearly 
 as possible the same amount of commodities when 
 a contract is completed as when it is made. 
 Economists dispute about almost everything else, 
 but they are unanimous in this : That a money 
 
20 IF NOT SILVBE, WHAT? 
 
 which changes rapidly in purchasing power is de- 
 structive of all stability and even of commercial 
 morality. Will anybody pretend that gold has not 
 changed rapidly in purchasing power within the 
 last twenty years ? Has not the universal expe- 
 rience shown that the variation has been very 
 much greater in one metal than it ever was when 
 the two metals were treated equally at the mint ? 
 The very least that could be asked on the score of 
 honesty would be free coinage of both, with a pro- 
 viso that debts should be paid with one-half of 
 each. Back of all that, however, comes in the 
 great principle of compensatory action, the varia- 
 tion of one metal counteracting that of the other ; 
 and from the standpoint of pure science and hon- 
 esty it is greatly to be regretted that, instead of 
 two precious metals, we have not at least five. 
 
 The market reports do indeed show an 
 unprecedented decline in the prices of farm 
 products, except in a few articles such as 
 butter, eggs, and poultry, in places where 
 increased population counteracts the ten- 
 dency to greater cheapness ; but this decline 
 is due to increased invention, and the great 
 cheapening in transportation. 
 
OBJECTIONS TO SILVEtt. 21 
 
 How much of it? The records of the Patent 
 Office show, and the experience of farmers con- 
 firms it, that all the improvements in farm ma- 
 chinery since 1870 hare not reduced the labor 
 cost of farm produce on the general average more 
 than 2 J per cent. Here is a little paradox for you 
 to study. In the twenty-five years from 1845 to 
 1870 the progress of invention in farm machinery 
 was greater than in all the previous history of the 
 world, marvellously rapid, in fact, and during those 
 years the farm price of the produce steadily in- 
 creased ; but in the ensuing twenty-five years to 
 1895 there were very few improvements, and the 
 price has declined with steadily increasing speed. 
 This fact is either ignorantly or skilfully evaded 
 by Edward Atkinson and David A. Wells in their 
 elaborate articles ou the subject ; so I will present 
 some facts and figures which were obtained early 
 this year in the Patent Office, and carefully veri- 
 fied by members of Congress from every portion of 
 the farming regions. 
 
 Since 1795 there have been granted 6,700 
 patents for plows, but since 1870 there have 
 been but three really valuable improvements. 
 Farmers are divided in opinion as to whether 
 the riding plow reduces the labor cost. The 
 
 / 
 
22 IF NOT SILVER, WHAT? 
 
 lister, recently patented, throws the earth into 
 a ridge and enables the farmer to plant without 
 previously breaking the soil. It is valuable in the 
 dry regions of the West, but useless where the 
 rainfall is great, as the soil must there be broken 
 up anyhow. There have been 920 corn gatherers 
 patented, of which only one is considered a suc- 
 cess, and most farmers reject it on account of the 
 waste. The general verdict is that the labor of 
 producing corn has been reduced very little, if 
 any. In the labor of producing potatoes there 
 has been no reduction whatever, nor in the finer 
 garden products, nor in fruits. It takes the same 
 labor to produce a fat hog or a fat ox, a sheep, 
 horse, or mule, as in 1870. In wool growing 
 many patents have been taken out for shearers, 
 and three of them are said to be savers of labor, 
 provided the wool grower is so situated that he 
 can attach the shearer to a horse or steam power. 
 
 There have been since the opening of the Office 
 6,620 patents for harvesters, of which the only 
 great improvement since 1870 is the twine binder, 
 for which over 900 patents have been taken out. 
 The beheader is used in California, as it was be- 
 fore 1870, and in the prairie regions the sheaf- 
 carrier has recently been introduced, holding the 
 
OBJECTIONS TO SILVER. 23 
 
 sheaves until enough are collected to make a 
 shock. Counting the labor of the men who did 
 the binding after the original McOormick reaper 
 at $2 per day, the total saving by all these 
 improvements since 1870 is estimated at 6 cents 
 per bushel for wheat, rye, and oats. Much of 
 this saving in labor is neutralized by cost of 
 machines, interest, and repairs. There have been 
 nearly 3,000 patents in fences, over 5,000 in the 
 making of boots and shoes, and in stoves and 
 heaters 8,240, none affecting farm labor except 
 the first. In cotton growing exactly the same 
 processes are used, from planting to picking, as 
 in 1850 ; but out of many hundred attempts to 
 invent a cotton picker it is now claimed that one 
 is a success, though it has not yet got into use. 
 The cost of ginning the cotton has been reduced 
 about two-fifths of a cent per pound. There have 
 been 176 patents for saw gins, 63 for roller gins, 
 and 47 for feeders to gins, out of all of which 
 there has been a new gin evolved which will be 
 in use hereafter. I might thus go around the 
 list, but enough has been said to show that nearly 
 all our farm machinery was in use before 1870, 
 and that since that date, as I said, the reduction 
 of labor cost has not upon the whole field ex- 
 
24 IF NOT SILVER, WHAT? 
 
 ceeded 2J per cent. The assertion that reduced 
 transportation lowers the farm price is in flat con- 
 tradiction of political economy, as, according to 
 that, the benefits should be divided between pro- 
 ducer and consumer, the farm price rising and 
 the city or export price declining. 
 
 The price of what the farmer has to buy 
 has declined in equal if not greater ratio, 
 and so his margin is as great as ever. 
 
 It is evident that you are not a practical 
 farmer. However, your non-acquaintance with 
 the figures is not to be wondered at when we 
 consider what has been said by great scholars and 
 statesmen. I recently heard a politician, and one 
 of perfectly Himalayan greatness, say in debate 
 that a day's work on an Illinois farm would now 
 produce more than twice as much as in 1870, and 
 another clinched it by adding that a man could 
 pay for a good farm by his surplus from five years' 
 crops. Now go to some practical farmer and get 
 him to make the calculation, and you will find 
 that what he has saved by reduced prices is less 
 than one-fifth of what he has lost from the same 
 cause. The average farm family in the central 
 West consists of five persons, and their greatest 
 
OBJECTIONS TO SILVER. 25 
 
 saving has been on clothing. You may set that 
 at $30 per year. The next is in sugar, for which 
 they pay but half the price of 1873. There is no 
 other item that will reach $5, not even including 
 all the iron or steel they have to buy in a year. 
 The largest estimate of gains, unless they go into 
 luxuries, does not exceed $90 per year. At least 
 a third of this gain is offset by increased taxes. 
 
 Now let us see what this farm family has lost, 
 counting only the price of the surplus it sells and 
 taking our average from the official reports. On 
 500 bushels of wheat, at least $250 ; on 600 bushels 
 of corn, $120 ; on ten tons of hay, $30 ; on rye, 
 oats, potatoes, and so forth, $50 ; on three horses 
 and mules sold per year, $100. Total, $550, being 
 more than ten times the net gain over taxes. 
 
 The Agricultural Department figures indicate 
 that, taking the United States as a whole, includ- 
 ing even the intensive farming near the cities, the 
 reduction of annual income is a few cents over $6 
 per acre. Thus something like $1,800,000,000 
 has been taken from the farmers' annual income, 
 and the farmer being just like any other man, in 
 that he cannot spend money that he does not get, 
 this withdraws $1,800,000,000 from the manufac- 
 turers' and general market. In view of these fig- 
 
26 IF NOT SILVER, WHAT? 
 
 ures — and if anything I have understated them — 
 what conceivable good would a raise in the tariff 
 do the manufacturers so long as our farmers must 
 sell on a gold basis and be subject at the same 
 time to the rapidly increasing competition of sil- 
 ver basis countries ? I have said nothing of fixed 
 charges which do not decline, or of the cost of the 
 federal government, which steadily and rapidly in- 
 creases. Have you heard of any decline in official 
 salaries, taxes, debts, bonds, or mortgages ? 
 
 That is plausible at first view, but it can- 
 not be true as to the country generally, be- 
 cause wages have risen ; or at least they 
 had risen continuously till 1892, as is clearly 
 shown in the Aldrich Report. 
 
 The Aldrich Eeport is a miserable fraud. It 
 does not so much as mention farmers and planters 
 or any of the laboring classes immediately depen- 
 dent on farmers. It gives only the wages of the 
 highest class of skilled laborers and in those trades 
 only where the men are organized in ironbound 
 trades unions which force up the wages of their 
 members. Take the lists and census and add the 
 numbers employed in every trade mentioned in 
 that report, and you will find that all together 
 
OBJECTIONS TO SILVER. 27 
 
 they only amount to one fourth the number of 
 farmers, or about 12 per cent, of the labor of the 
 country. Furthermore,Jt takes no account what- 
 ever of the immense percentage of men in each 
 trade who are out of employment. One who 
 didn't know better would conclude from it that 
 our coal miners worked 300 days in the year, and 
 that stone masons, plasterers, and the like worked 
 all the year in the latitude of New York and Chi- 
 cago. And these are but a few of the tricks and 
 absurdities of the report. 
 
 Wages are labor's share of its own product. 
 The claim that wages generally can rise on a de- 
 clining market involves a flat contradiction of 
 arithmetic ; it assumes that the separate factors 
 can increase while the sum total is decreasing, and 
 that the operator can pay more while he is every 
 day getting less. The whole philosophy of the 
 subject was admirably summed up by a Southern 
 negro with whom I recently talked. " If wages 
 be up, how come 'em up ? We all's gittin' but 
 half what we useter git for our cotton, and how 
 kin five cents a pound pay me like ten cents a 
 pound, and me a pickin' out no mo' cotton ?" 
 His philosophy applies to 60 per cent, of all the 
 working people in the United States, for that pro- 
 
28 
 
 portion do not work for money wages. They pro- 
 dace, and what they sell the product for is their 
 wages. Viewed in this, the only true light, the 
 wages of 60 per cent, of our laborers have declined 
 nearly one half, making the average decline for 
 all laborers nearly a third. How, indeed, could it 
 be otherwise ? Will any sensible man believe that 
 a farmer could pay men as much to produce wheat 
 at $.50 as at $1.50 ? Or take the case of the cotton 
 grower. It takes a talented negro to make and 
 save 3,000 pounds of lint cotton ; when he sold it 
 at $.10 he got $300, and when he sells it at $.05 he 
 gets $150, and all the tricks of all the goldbugs in 
 the world cannot make it otherwise. To tell such 
 men that their wages have increased, in the face 
 of what they know to be the facts, is arrogant and 
 insulting nonsense. 
 
 This nation should have the best money 
 in the world. 
 
 Very true. And the question of what is the 
 best can only be determined by science and expe- 
 rience. It is certain that gold standing alone is 
 not ; for its fluctuations in purchasing power have 
 been so tremendous as again and again to throw 
 the commercial world into jimjams. History 
 
OBJECTIONS TO SILVER. 29 
 
 shows that it has Yaried 100 per cent, in a cen- 
 tury, and we have seen in this country that its 
 value declined about 25 per cent, from 1848 to 
 1857, and that it has increased something like 60 
 per cent, since 1873. Without desiring to be ill- 
 natured, I must say it seems to me that a man 
 has a queerly constituted mind who insists that 
 that is the only "honest money." 
 
 But we don't want 50-cent dollars. 
 
 And you can't have 'em, my dear sir. A dollar 
 consists of 100 cents. The phrase " 50-cent dol- 
 lar" and that other phrase "honest money "re- 
 mind me of what I used to hear in my boyhood 
 when the slavery question was debated with such 
 heat : " What I Would you want your sister to 
 marry a nigger ? Whoosh ! " It was assumed, if 
 a man denounced slavery, that he wanted the col- 
 ored man for a brother-in-law. Men who employ 
 such phrases show a secret consciousness of having 
 a weak cause. And while I am about it I may as 
 well add that I do not admire the way some of our 
 fellows have of denouncing gold as "British 
 money." Great fools, indeed, the British would be 
 if they did not fight for a gold basis, for by reason 
 of it they get twice as much of our wheat, meat, 
 
80 IF NOT SILYEB. WHAT? 
 
 and cotton for the $200,000,000 per year w« have 
 to pay them in interest. According to the 
 Chancellor of the Exchequer, the world owes Eng- 
 land $12,000,000,000, on which she realizes a little 
 oyer four and a half per cent., or pretty nearly 
 $600,000,000 per year. Fully that, if we add in- 
 come from property her citizens own in this and 
 other countries. On the day we demonetized sil- 
 ver, that $600,000,000 could have been paid in 
 gold in the port of New York with 450,000,000 
 bushels of wheat ; to-day it would take 900,000,- 
 000 bushels. In short, the amount of grain Eng- 
 land has made clear because of the rest of the 
 "world adopting monometallism would bread all 
 her people, feed all her live stock, and make three 
 gallons of whiskey for every person on the island. 
 Why shouldn't they take what the world willingly 
 gives them ? I have my opinion, however, of the 
 common sense of a world which does things that 
 way. 
 
 We want money that is equally good all 
 over the world. 
 
 There is no such money. The coin we send 
 abroad is only bullion when it gets there, and most 
 dealers prefer government bars. The exchange 
 
OBJECTIONS TO SILVER. 81 
 
 must be calculated exactly the same whether we 
 use gold, silver, or paper in our domestic trade ; 
 and this notion that we "should be at a disadvan- 
 tage in the exchange" is a delusion. The vari- 
 ations in the value of the greenback during our 
 war era were calculated daily, and prices in this 
 country rose or fell to correspond. It must, I 
 say, be calculated just the same in gold or silver, 
 and any smart schoolboy can do it in a minute on 
 any transaction. 
 
 What I mean is that the silver dollar is 
 worth only 50 cents in gold. 
 
 And by the same token the gold dollar is worth 
 200 cents in silver. The answer is as logical as 
 the quip, and neither is worth notice. Such a 
 process merely assumes an arbitrary standard and 
 measures all other things by it, as the drunkard 
 in a certain stage of intoxication thinks that his 
 company is drunk while he is duly sober. And, 
 by the way, where do you get your moral right to 
 say that a dollar which will buy two bushels of 
 wheat or twenty pounds of cotton is any more 
 honest than one which will buy one bushel or ten 
 pounds ? Is it because with the dear dollar the 
 farmer must work twice as long to pay off a mort- 
 
82 IF NOT SILVER, WHAT? 
 
 gage, that the interest paid on the great debts of 
 the world will buy twice as much, and the debtor 
 nations are put at a terrible disadvantage as to the 
 creditor nations personally? Is that honest ? 
 
 A very safe test of any theory is to follow it to 
 its logical conclusion. Tate your "honest" 
 money argument, on the basis of twenty years' 
 experience, and see where it will take you in the 
 near future. The dollar which buys two bushels 
 of wheat or sixteen pounds of cotton is " honest," 
 you say, and a dollar which buys but one bushel 
 or eight pounds is not. By and by, if your 
 fallacy prevails, the dollar will buy three bushels 
 of wheat or twenty-five pounds of cotton, and will 
 then, by your reasoning, be much more "honest" 
 than now. Is that your idea ? How much lower 
 must prices go before you will admit that gold has 
 gained in purchasing power? 
 
 But it cannot be that prices have fallen 
 because of the scarcity of money, for the low 
 rate of interest now prevailing proves that 
 money is abundant and cheap. 
 
 That is a very old fallacy, and a singularly tena- 
 cious one, as it seems that no amount of experi- 
 ence drives it from the minds of men. Look over 
 
OBJECTIONS TO SILVER. 33 
 
 the history of our panioB and you Trill find that 
 after the first convulsion is past the hanks are soon 
 crowded with idle money, and the rate of interest 
 falls. Take notice, however, that the money lend- 
 ers always declare that they must have "gilt- 
 edged paper." Interest on first-class securities is 
 never lower than in the hardest times which fol- 
 low a particularly severe panic, and the reason is 
 ohvious : all far-seeing business men know that 
 prices are likely to fall, and, consequently, invest- 
 ments become unprofitable : therefore they do not 
 invest ; therefore they do not want money ; there- 
 fore they do not borrow, and idle money accumu- 
 lates. This is a phenomenon always observed in 
 hard times. In good times, on the contrary, 
 when investments are reasonably sure to be profit- 
 able, there is naturally an increased demand for 
 money, and so the rate of interest rises. As a 
 matter of fact, however, interest rates, when 
 properly estimated, have been for several years 
 past very much higher than previously — that is, 
 the borrower has, in actual value, paid very much 
 more ; so rapid has been the increase of the pur- 
 chasing power of money, that the six per cent, now 
 paid on a loan will buy more than the ten per 
 cent, paid a few years ago. In addition to that, 
 8 
 
34 IF NOT SILVER, WHAT? 
 
 the value of the loan has been steadily increasing. 
 Make a calculation for either of the years since 
 1890, and you will find it to be something like 
 this : the six per cent, paid as interest has the pur- 
 chasing power of at least ten per cent, a few 
 years ago, and the lender has gained at least two 
 per cent, a year, if not twice that, by the increased 
 value of his money ; so the borrower will have 
 paid, at the maturity of his obligation, at least 
 twelve per cent, per annum, and probably much 
 more. 
 
 The silent and insidious increase of their obli- 
 gations, by reason of the enhanced and steadily 
 enhancing value of gold, has ruined many thou- 
 sands of business men who are even now uncon- 
 scious of the real cause or of the power that has 
 destroyed them. 
 
 I may add in this connection that the three per 
 cent, now paid on a United States bond is worth 
 about as much in commodities as the six per cent, 
 paid previous to 1870, and at the same time the 
 bond has doubled in value for the same reason ; 
 thus, calculated on the basis of twenty-five years, 
 the bondholder is really receiving, or has received, 
 the equivalent of ten per cent, interest. 
 
DEMONETIZATION OF GOLD. 
 
 Gold has an intrinsic value, says the mono- 
 metallist, which makes it the money of the world. 
 It is sound and stable, while silver fluctuates. See 
 how much more silver an ounce of gold will buy 
 than in 1873, but the gold dollar remains the 
 same, worth its face as bullion anywhere in the 
 world. 
 
 But suppose there had been a general demoneti- 
 zation of gold instead of silver, how would the 
 ratio have stood then ? Would not the same rea- 
 soning prove silver unchangeable, and gold the 
 fluctuating metal ? 
 
 Oh, nonsense ! it is impossible to demonetize 
 gold, because the civilized world recognizes it as 
 an invariable standard by which all commodities 
 are measured in value. The supposition is absurd. 
 It would be very much like deoxygenizing the air. 
 
 But, my dear sir, gold has been demonetized, 
 and not very long ago, either, and very extensive- 
 ly, too. It was deprived of its legal tender qual- 
 ity by four great nations, comprising some seventy 
 
36 IF NOT SILVER, WHAT? 
 
 million people ; demonetized because it was cheap 
 and because the world's creditors believed it was 
 going to be cheaper ; the demonetization, so far 
 as it went, produced enormous evils, and nothing 
 but the firmness of France and the far-seeing 
 wisdom of her financiers prevented the demonetiza- 
 tion becoming general on the continent of Europe, 
 which would have reversed the present position of 
 the two metals in the public mind. 
 
 Of the many singular features in the present 
 overheated controversy, probably the most singular 
 is the fact that comparatively few bimetallists know 
 of, or, at any rate, say much about, this demoneti- 
 zation of gold, while the monometallists ignore it 
 entirely, and many of them, who ought to know 
 better, absolutely deny it. 
 
 So extensive was this demonetization of gold, 
 and so far-reaching were its consequences, that it 
 may easily be believed that it was the beginning of 
 all our misfortunes, and that the crime of the cen- 
 tury, instead of being the demonetization of silver 
 in 1873, was really the demonetization of gold in 
 1857 ; for that was the first general or preconcerted 
 international action to destroy the monetary func- 
 tions of one of the metals and throw the burden 
 upon the other, and it first familiarized the minds 
 
DEMONETIZATION OF GOLD. 37 
 
 of financiers, and especially of the creditor classes, 
 with the fact that the thing might easily be done 
 and that it would work enormously to their advan- 
 tage. 
 
 It may also be said that it led logically to the 
 action of 1867, which was but the beginning of a 
 general demonetization of silver. 
 
 The history of gold demonetization is full of 
 instruction and is here given in detail. 
 
 In 1840-45 the world was hungering for gold. 
 All the leading nations had just passed through 
 financial convulsions which shook the very foun- 
 dations of society. Several American states had 
 either repudiated their debts outright or scaled 
 them in ways that to the English mind looked dis- 
 honest, and there was a general uneasiness among 
 the creditor classes of the world. A universal fall 
 of prices had produced the same results with which 
 we are now so painfully familiar. In the half 
 century terminating with 1840 the world had pro- 
 duced but $529,942,000 in gold, coinage value, and 
 $1,364,697,000 in silver, or some forty ounces of 
 silver to one of gold ; yet their ratio of values had 
 varied but little, and the variation was not increas- 
 ing. Why ? Monometallists have raked the world 
 in vain for an answer. Bimetallists point to the 
 
88 IF NOT SILVER, WHAT? 
 
 only one that is satisfactory, namely, the persist- 
 ence of France in treating both metals equally at 
 her mints. But there were grave apprehensions 
 that Prance alone could not maintain the parity, 
 and so, as aforesaid, all the world was hungry for 
 gold. 
 
 And in all the world there was not one observer 
 who dreamed that this hunger would soon be far 
 more than satiated, and the philosopher who should 
 have predicted half of what was soon to come 
 would have been jeered at as a crazy optimist. In 
 1848 gold was discovered in California, and three 
 years later in Australia. The supply from Africa 
 and the sands of the Ural Mountains had previ- 
 ously increased, so that in 1847-8 it was equal to 
 that of silver. But how trifling was this increase 
 to what followed. In 1849 there was still a slight 
 excess of silver production, and in 1850 the pro- 
 portion was but $44,450,000 of gold to $39,000,000 
 in silver. Then gold production went forward by 
 great leaps and bounds. How nrach was produced ? 
 
 Well, the estimates vary greatly. Soetbeer places 
 the amount at $1,407,000,000 by the close of 1860 ; 
 but Tooke and Newmarche have put it about $100,- 
 000,000 less. In the same era the production of 
 silver varied but a trifle from $40,000,000 a year. 
 
DEMONETIZATION OF GOLD. 39 
 
 A committee of the United States Senate, ap- 
 pointed for investigating the facts, reported that 
 in the twelve years ending with 1860 the gold pro- 
 duced was $1,339,400,000 ; and in the next thir- 
 teen years, ending with 1873, it was $1,411,825,000. 
 Thus, in the thirteen years following the Califor- 
 nia discovery the stock of gold in the world was 
 doubled, and in the twenty-five years ending with 
 1873 it was more than tripled. Several economic 
 writers have made the statement very much 
 stronger than this, and M. Chevalier, in his famous 
 argument for the demonetization of gold, written 
 in 1857, declares that the production of gold as 
 compared with silver had increased fivefold in six 
 years and fifteenfold in forty years, and that, 
 owing to the export of silver to Asia and its nse in 
 the arts, there would, in a very Jittle while, be no 
 possible method of maintaining the parity of the 
 two metals in money at any ratio which would be 
 honest and profitable. 
 
 And what was the real fact ? The ratio, which 
 is 1849 was 15Jfo of silver to 1 of gold in the 
 London market, and the same in 1850, never sank 
 below lfyifo to 1, and never rose above the 
 ratio of 1849 till after silver was demonetized. 
 Why this wonderful steadiness ? The answer is 
 
40 IF NOT SILVER, WHAT? 
 
 easy. In the eight years of 1853-60 France im- 
 ported gold to the value of 3,082,000,000 t, or 
 $616,000,000, and exported silver to the value of 
 $293,000,000 ; in short, her bullion operations 
 amounted to $909,000,000. She stood it without 
 a quiver ; she grew and prospered as never before. 
 She resolutely refused to change her ratio. Her 
 mints stood open to all the gold and silver of 
 the world, and thus did she save the world from a 
 great calamity. 
 
 Scarcely, however, had the golden flood begun 
 when the moneyed classes and those with fixed in- 
 comes raised a loud cry. Prom the laboring pro- 
 ducers no complaint was heard. They never com- 
 plain of increased coinage. In the United States 
 we knew nothing of this clamor, for we then had 
 no large creditor class, no great amount of bonds, 
 and very few people interested more in the value 
 of money than in the rewards of labor. In 
 Europe, however, all the leading writers on 
 finance and industries took part. In 1852 M. 
 Leon Faucher wrote : " Every one was frightened 
 ten years ago at the prospect of the depreciation of 
 silver ; during the last eighteen months it is the 
 diminution in the price of gold that has been 
 alarming the public." In England, the philoso- 
 
DEMONETIZATION OF GOLD. 41 
 
 pher DeQuincey wrote that California and Aus- 
 tralia might be relied upon to furnish the world 
 $350,000,000 in gold per year for many years, 
 thus rendering the metal practically worthless for 
 monetary purposes, and another Englishman, as 
 if resolved to go one better, declared that gold 
 would soon be fit only for the dust pan. M. 
 Chevalier took up the task of convincing the na- 
 tions that gold should be demonetized as too 
 cheap for a currency, and of course the interested 
 classes soon organized for action. 
 
 Holland had already begun the process in 1847, 
 but had managed it so awkwardly that her condi- 
 tion is not easily understood or described as it was 
 in 1857. The estimated amount to be thrown out 
 of use was only half the real amount, and in the 
 attempt to avoid a small evil they produced a 
 very great one. 
 
 Austria was at that time involved in trouble 
 with her paper money system, and thought the 
 cheapening of gold offered a fair opportunity to 
 come to a metallic basis. The reasoning of her 
 statesmen was singularly like that of General 
 Grant in 1874, when he pointed to the great silver 
 discoveries in Nevada as a providential aid to the 
 restoration of specie payments, being at the time 
 
42 IF NOT SILVER, WHAT? 
 
 in sublime ignorance that he had long before 
 signed an act demonetizing silver, and thereby 
 depriving this country of the benefit of such prov- 
 idential aid. But the strength of the creditor 
 classes was entirely too much for Austria and 
 Prussia, and the German States allied with them 
 almost unanimously declared for throwing gold 
 out of circulation. A convention had been held 
 at Dresden in 1838, with the view to unifying the 
 coinage, but little had been accomplished, and 
 now a convention was called at Vienna, which was 
 attended by authorized representatives of Prussia, 
 Austria, and the South German States. It was 
 there stated that, besides various minor coins, 
 there were three great competing systems in 
 Germany, namely, those of Austria, Prussia, and 
 Bavaria. It is needless to go into details of this 
 once famous convention, but suffice it to say that 
 the following points were agreed upon: (1) The 
 Prussian thaler was to be the standard for Prussia 
 and the South German States, and was to be a 
 silver standard exclusively. (2) The Austrian 
 silver standard was to prevail throughout that 
 empire. (3) The contracting powers could coin 
 trade coins in gold, but none others, except 
 Austria, which retained the right of coining 
 
DEMONETIZATION OF GOLD. 43 
 
 ducats, and these gold coins were to have their 
 value fixed entirely by the relation of the supply to 
 the demand. " They were not therefore to be con- 
 sidered as mediums of payments in the same nature 
 as the legal silver currency, and nobody was legally 
 bound to receive them as such ; " in short, none 
 of the gold coins permitted by the convention 
 were to be legal tender, but all were to be mere 
 trade coins precisely for the same purpose as the 
 trade dollar once so famous in the United States. 
 The result, of course, was to make silver the 
 standard and gold the fluctuating money or token 
 money. The effects of this convention remained 
 with but little change till 1871. 
 
 Of course, gold at once became "dishonest 
 money." It was worth less than silver, and a 
 regular gold panic set in. Holland had already 
 demonetized most of her gold coinage, that is, 
 had deprived it of the legal tender quality, and 
 Portugal now practically prohibited any gold from 
 having current value, except English sovereigns. 
 Belgium demonetized all its gold at one sweep, 
 and Eussia prohibited the export of silver. Thus, 
 in an alarmingly short space of time five nations 
 had practically demonetized gold, and others were 
 threatening to do so, and the world was rapidly 
 
44 IF NOT SILVEE, "WHAT? 
 
 being taught that gold was the discredited metal, 
 while silver was the stable and sound money. 
 
 Some curious and a few amusing results fol- 
 lowed. Among a certain class in England a regu- 
 lar panic broke out, and in Holland and Belgium 
 even the masses of the people became suspicious 
 of gold and disliked to take it in payment. In 
 the latter country a few traders hung out signs to 
 attract customers, to this effect, "L'or est recu 
 sans perte," meaning that gold money would be 
 taken there without a discount. It is probably 
 not known to one American in a thousand that 
 the practice of inserting a silver clause in con- 
 tracts became at that time so common in Europe 
 that it was actually transferred to the United 
 States, and in England life insurance companies 
 were established on a silver basis. Several Ameri- 
 can corporations stipulated for payment in silver, 
 especially of rents, and to this day a New England 
 establishment is receiving a certain number of 
 ounces of fine silver yearly under leases then 
 drawn up. 
 
 It is equally interesting to note in the literature 
 of that period arguments against gold almost 
 word for word like those now used against silver. 
 The financial managers threw gold out of use and 
 
DEMONETIZATION OF GOLD. 45 
 
 then urged its non-use as a reason for its demone- 
 tization. " None in circulation," " Tariation shows 
 impossibility of bimetallism" — such were the 
 phrases then applied to gold, as we now find them 
 applied to silver. An artificial disturbance was 
 created, and then pleaded as a reason for further 
 disturbance. 
 
 All this while the financiers of England were 
 bombarded with arguments and prophecies of evil, 
 but her geologists pointed out clearly that Aus- 
 tralian and Californian products were almost 
 entirely from the washing of alluvial sands and 
 consequently must be very temporary. Her 
 statesmen believed the geologists rather than the 
 panic-stricken financiers, and so she held for gold 
 monometallism. 
 
 But it is to France that the world is indebted 
 for maintaining the parity through those years 
 of alarm and panic. M. Chevalier urged upon 
 French statesmen the importance of returning to 
 the system which had been in force previous to 
 1785, when silver was the standard and gold was 
 rated to it by a law or proclamation. The propo- 
 sition was actually brought forward in Council 
 and urged upon the Emperor that silver should be 
 made the standard and gold re-rated in proportion 
 
46 IF NOT SILVER, WHAT? 
 
 to it every six months. The net result was, by 
 France taking in gold and letting out silver, that 
 in 1865 that country had a larger stock of gold 
 than any other in Europe. Suffice it to repeat 
 that several nations, including seventy million 
 people, actually demonetized gold, deprived it of 
 its legal tender, and treated it as a ratable com- 
 modity; while Prance, single-handed and alone 
 upon the continent of Europe, was able to absorb 
 the enormous surplus of gold and maintain the 
 parity by the simple process of keeping her mints 
 open to both at the ancient ratio. 
 
 Thus ended the scheme to drive gold out of 
 circulation and base the business of the world 
 upon one metal, and that the dearer metal, silver. 
 But suppose the scheme had succeeded ; suppose 
 Prance had been less firm ; what a wonderful 
 flood of wisdom on the virtues of silver we should 
 have had from the monometallists ! How arro- 
 gantly they would have denounced us — who should, 
 I trust, in that case have been laboring to restore 
 gold to free coinage — how arrogantly they would 
 have denounced us as the advocates of cheap 
 money, dishonest tricksters, repudiators ! How 
 they would have rung the changes on " dishonest 
 money," " fifty-cent gold dollars ! " What long, 
 
DEMONETIZATION OF GOLD. 47 
 
 long columns of figures should we have had to 
 prove the stability of silver, the fluctuating nature 
 of gold ! What denunciations, what sneers, what 
 gibes, what slurs would have filled the New York 
 city papers in regard to those Western fellows who 
 want to degrade the standard ! How glib would 
 have been the tongues of their orators in denounc- 
 ing all who advocated the remonetization of gold 
 as cranks, socialists, populists, anarchists, ne'er- 
 do-wells, and Adullamites, kickers, visionaries, 
 and frauds ! Is there any practical doubt that we 
 should have witnessed all this ? None whatever ; 
 in fact, something of the same sort was heard in 
 Europe at the time of the demonetization of gold. 
 It all goes to show that self-interest blinds the 
 intellects of the best of men so that they readily 
 believe that which is to their interest is honest, 
 but that the farmer who seeks to raise the price of 
 what he has to sell thereby throws himself down 
 as dishonest. Of course, the successful demone- 
 tization of gold would have brought about an 
 enormous appreciation of the value of silver, since 
 it would have thrown the whole burden of main- 
 taining the business of the world upon one metal, 
 and equally, of course, we should have had the 
 same attacks upon the owners of gold mines that 
 
48 IF NOT SILVER, WHAT? 
 
 we now have upon the owners of silver mines. As 
 the withdrawal of silver from its place as primary 
 money and its reduction to the level of token 
 money has thrown the burden of sustaining prices 
 upon gold, so unquestionably would the reverse 
 process have occurred had gold been reduced to 
 token money in place of silver. All this we know 
 would have taken place from what actually did 
 take place, and this makes important the history 
 of the demonetization of gold. 
 
BELATIVE PRODUCTION OF GOLD AND 
 SILVEE. 
 
 Among the many plausible pleas of the mono- 
 metallists, the most plausible, perhaps, is the plea 
 that the great divergence between the metals since 
 1873 has been due entirely to the increased pro- 
 duction of silver. A very brief examination, I 
 think, will show its falsity, and that it is equally 
 false in fact and fallacious in logic ; for, first, 
 there has been no great " depreciation " in silver, 
 that metal having almost the same power to com- 
 mand commodities, excepting gold, that it had in 
 1873 ; and, second, the claim that the increased 
 production of ten or twenty years would alone 
 greatly cheapen silver is flatly contradicted by all 
 previous experience. Of many statements of the 
 fallacy, I take a recent one from the New York 
 Times as the most terse and catchy for popular 
 reading, and likewise most ludicrously absurd : 
 
 "Why Silver is Cheap. 
 
 "In 1873 the total product of silver in the 
 4 
 
50 IF NOT SILVEE, WHAT? 
 
 world was 61,100,000 ounces, and the silver in a 
 dollar was worth $1.04 in gold. 
 
 "Last year the world's product of silver was 
 165,000,000 ounces, and the silver in a dollar was 
 worth only 50.7 cents. 
 
 " In 1894 the potato crop of the United States 
 was, in round numbers, 170,000,000 bushels, and 
 the average price 53c. 
 
 "In 1895 the estimated potato crop was 400,- 
 000,000 bushels, and the average price was 26c. 
 
 " The fall in both cases was due to the same 
 cause." 
 
 Observe the assumptions : 1. That the output 
 of one year determined the value of silver as the 
 crop of potatoes does their price for that year ! 
 The schoolboy who does not know better deserves 
 the rattan. If the theory were correct, gold in 
 1856 should have been worth but a fourth what it 
 was in 1848, whereas the largest estimate of its 
 decline in value puts it at 25 per cent. 
 
 2. That the increased silver production of 
 twenty-two years would reduce its value in the 
 exact mathematical proportions of the increase. 
 This theory ignores the two most important facts 
 determining the value of money : that the silver 
 or gold mined in any one year is added to the 
 
RELATIVE PRODUCTION. 51 
 
 existing stock, to which it is but a minute in- 
 crease ; and that wealth, population, and produc- 
 tion are also increasing rapidly, relative to which 
 the increase of silver is but a trifle indeed. The 
 yield of the Monte Eeal a thousand years ago may 
 have cost five times as much labor per ounce, and 
 that of Laurium ten or even twenty times as 
 much ; but all of both which is not lost goes with 
 the last ounce mined into the general stock, which 
 is now about $4,000,000,000 in coin alone. The 
 greatest annual production has in but a very few 
 cases added so much as 3 per cent, to the stock on 
 hand, and about half of it is consumed in the 
 arts. If the increase of the annual production of 
 silver by 2f to 1 in twenty-two years reduced its 
 value one-half, will the Times tell us what 
 should have been the reduction in the value of 
 gold when this product increased by fivefold in 
 eight years ? It should further be noted that the 
 discovery of a " Big Bonanza " is an event so rare 
 that it has not happened, on an average, more 
 than once in three centuries since the dawn of 
 history, and that since 1873 the growth in the 
 world's production and trade has been, relative 
 to former times, even greater than the increase 
 in the production of silver. 
 
52 IP NOT SILVEB, WHAT? 
 
 Consider the following facts, which I have con- 
 densed from Mulhall : In 1800 the total yearly 
 international commerce of the world was esti- 
 mated at $1,510,000,000. Forty years later it 
 had only increased 90 per cent., amounting in 
 1840 to $2,865,000,000, and in that year there 
 were in all the world but 4,315 miles of railroad 
 and no electric telegraph. The total horse-power 
 of all the steamships of the world was but 330,000, 
 and the carrying power of all the shipping but 
 10,482,000 tons. To-day the international com- 
 merce of the world is almost $20,000,000,000, and 
 increasing at the rate of $1,000,000,000 per year ; 
 there are in the world over 400,000 miles of rail- 
 way and a very much greater mileage of magnetic 
 telegraph, including 14 intercontinental cables ; 
 the ocean tonnage of Great Britain alone is very 
 much greater than was that of the whole world in 
 1840 ; and tremendous as this increase of inter- 
 national trade has been, it is the merest trifle com- 
 pared with the increase of the internal trade in 
 several of the greater nations. 
 
 What then has caused the "great deprecia- 
 tion " ? Nothing has caused it. There has been 
 but a trifling depreciation indeed. It is as clearly 
 proved as anything unseen can be that if the 
 
RELATIVE PRODUCTION. 53 
 
 nations had left silver and gold as they were in 
 1870, both would hare gained materially in value, 
 that is, in the power to command commodities, 
 because of the vastly greater relative increase of 
 the latter ; but by demonetization all the increase 
 has been concentrated in gold, leaving silver al- 
 most exactly as it was. At present, however, I 
 devote myself to the question whether there has 
 been such an increase in the production as would 
 normally cheapen it. On this point we have evi- 
 dence to convince any unbiased mind, for the 
 relative production of silver and gold has in for- 
 mer ages varied very much more than in the last 
 twenty-three years, and the variation has ex- 
 tended over much longer periods, without causing 
 more than the most trifling divergences in value. 
 And the explanation is simple : the two metals 
 received equal recognition at the mint and in 
 legal tender laws ; the greatly increased use of the 
 cheaper maintained its value in coinage, while dis- 
 use of the dearer tended equally to check its ap- 
 preciation. In this sense government can " create 
 value " by creating a use. 
 
 From 1660 to 1700, for instance, the production 
 of silver averaged in value much more than twice 
 that of gold, and in quantity some thirty-three 
 
54 IF NOT SILVER, WHAT? 
 
 times as much ; yet all those years, the highest 
 mint ratio was 15.20 to 1 and the lowest 14.81 — 
 a variation in money value of but .39 or 2.6 per 
 cent. Prom 1701 to 1760 inclusive, the propor- 
 tion of gold produced gradually rose from a little 
 over a third to 40 per cent, in values, yet the 
 money ratio remained remarkably constant, the 
 highest being 15.52 of silver to 1 of gold and the 
 lowest 14.14. In other words, for sixty years 
 there were produced on an average about 28 
 ounces of silver to 1 of gold, yet the widest 
 variation of their money values in all those years 
 was less than 9 per cent. In the face of such 
 facts as these, we are asked to believe that while 
 an average of over 30 ounces to 1 created an aver- 
 age variation of less than 6 per cent., and a great- 
 est variation of less than 9 per cent., a production 
 of some 20 ounces to 1 since 1882 has created a 
 variation of 100 per cent. And that the variation 
 began nine years before the value production of 
 silver exceeded that of gold ! It is an affront to 
 our common sense. 
 
 I should say, at this point, that my figures are 
 taken from the latest, and in my opinion the 
 most scholarly work in favor of monometallism, 
 "The History of Currency," by Prof. "W. A. 
 
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RELATIVE PRODUCTION. 55 
 
 Shaw, Fellow of the Royal Historical and Royal 
 Statistical Societies. As the ratio between silver 
 and gold varied considerably in the different marts 
 of Europe, I follow his plan (which is Soetbeer's) 
 of taking it as it stood at any particular time in 
 the city which might then be called the greatest 
 commercial centre, whether Venice, Hamburg, 
 Antwerp, or London. His history comprises the 
 entire period from 1252 to 1894. It is only fair 
 that I should also give his explanation of the 
 stability of the metals, which is extremely inter- 
 esting. 
 
 He begins his second chapter with the state- 
 ment that the discovery of America was "the 
 monetary salvation and resurrection of the Old 
 World " ; that it was a time of unexampled in- 
 crease in the precious metals and equally unexam- 
 pled rise of prices, but there was also "feverish 
 instability and want of equilibrium in the mone- 
 tary systems of Europe." He shows how the first 
 great import was of gold, which began to affect 
 prices in 1520 ; how this was followed by a very 
 much greater increase in silver, and how, while 
 prices were rising so rapidly as to stimulate trade 
 and incidentally do damage by causing great fluc- 
 tuations, yet there must have been some great 
 
56 IF NOT StLVEE, WHAT? 
 
 regulator preventing the evil which we should 
 a priori have expected. He finds it in the fact 
 that Antwerp had taken the place of Venice and 
 Florence, and conducted a great trade with the 
 far East. His language is : " The centre of Euro- 
 pean exchanges — Antwerp in the sixteenth cen- 
 tury as London to-day — has always performed one 
 supremest function, that of regulating the flow of 
 metals from the New World by means of export- 
 ing the overplus to the East. The drain of silver 
 to the East, discernible from the very birth of 
 European commerce, has been the salvation of 
 Europe, and in providing for it Antwerp acted as 
 the safety-valve of the sixteenth century system as 
 London has done since. The importance of the 
 change of the centre of gravity and exchange from 
 Venice to Antwerp, therefore, lies in this fact. 
 Under the old system of overland and limited 
 trade, Venice could only provide for such puny 
 exchange and flow as the mediaeval system of 
 Europe demanded ; she would have been unable 
 to cope with such a flood of inflowing metal as the 
 sixteenth century witnessed, and Europe would 
 have been overwhelmed." 
 
 Professor Shaw argues that without the Eastern 
 safety-valve Europe would have been ruined by an 
 
RELATIVE PRODUCTION. 57 
 
 excess of the precious metals, that India furnished 
 the needed reservoir — did she not take gold as 
 well as silver ? — and that Venice was so far limited 
 to an overland trade that she could not have per- 
 formed the function Antwerp did. Later he sets 
 forth the current monometallist position that the 
 nations are now as one in trade and the inter- 
 change of the precious metals, and therefore even 
 the partial equilibrium of the sixteenth and sev- 
 enteenth centuries could not be maintained. Let 
 us, then, bring the figures down to the present, 
 and it will be found, I think, that the farther 
 down we come the weaker does the monometallist 
 contention appear. 
 
 The improved, more extended, and more inti- 
 mate intercourse of the nations brought about by 
 the introduction of steam, electricity, and other 
 agencies tends to minimize the fluctuations of the 
 two metals, and indicates that the divergences of 
 the metals in mediaeval times was due rather to 
 the want of speedy, easy, and certain intercourse 
 and communication of the nations than to an 
 innate commercial tendency of the two metals to 
 diverge. Had the same intimate and speedy com- 
 mercial relation existed between the nations of the 
 world in those times as now exists, the equalizing 
 
58 IP NOT SILVER, WHAT? 
 
 tendencies of trade would evidently have pre- 
 vented not only the ratio of divergence to which 
 the metals attained at different periods, bnt would 
 have prevented a difference of ratio existing between 
 the different nations at the same period of time. 
 
 Prom 1761 to 1800, inclusive, the relative pro- 
 duction of gold decreased steadily, until it was 
 but 23.4 per cent, of the total value, to 76.6 per 
 cent, of silver. In other words, there were for 
 many of the later years over 50 ounces of silver 
 produced to 1 of gold, and yet the ratio stood 
 long at 15.68 to 1. This is almost exactly the 
 ratio fixed by Hamilton and Jefferson, fixed be- 
 cause of its long-continued maintenance in Euro- 
 pean markets. During these forty years the pro- 
 duction of silver in proportion to gold was never 
 for even one year as low as the highest proportion 
 of any year since 1873, and yet the money value 
 only varied from 14.42 to 15.72, or a fraction over 
 8 per cent. In the face of such figures as these, the 
 change in relative production since 1873 seems too 
 trifling to be taken into account, especially since 
 in that year and some time after the value pro- 
 duction of gold at 16 to 1 was much the greater, 
 nor was it till 1883 that the world's silver product 
 exceeded that of gold. 
 
RELATIVE PRODUCTION. 59 
 
 In 1800-10 the annual production of gold was 
 $12,069,000 and of silver almost exactly $39,000,- 
 000, or some 50 ounces to 1 ; yet the highest ratio 
 was 16.08, and the lowest 15.26. This relative 
 production changed very slowly, and in 1831-40 
 of the total in values produced 34.5 per cent, 
 was gold and 65.5 per cent, silver. 
 
 That is, there were, for ten years, about thirty 
 times as many ounces of silver mined as of gold, 
 and during these years the change in the ratio was 
 so minute that it can only be calculated in small 
 fractions of 1 per cent. In 1841-50, for the first 
 time since the middle of the sixteenth century, we 
 find the production of gold the greater, that metal 
 being 52.1 per cent, of the total product, and sil- 
 ver but 47.9 per cent. During the decade the 
 lowest value ratio of silver to gold was 15.70, and 
 the highest 15.93, a variation of only 1.4 percent. 
 Then California and Australia poured out their 
 wonderful golden flood, and all the world was 
 changed. In 1851-55 the gold yield was 77.6 per 
 cent, of the total, and the silver yield 22.4, and 
 for the next five years the change was but .2 of 
 1 per cent. In other words, during those ten 
 years the average annual yield of silver was less 
 than 5 ounces to 1 of gold ; so if the " over- 
 
60 IF NOT SILVER, WHAT? 
 
 production theory " laid down by the Times were 
 correct, gold should have lost — well, at least 70 
 per cent, of its value in silver. The actual vari- 
 ation was from a ratio of 15.98 to one of 15.46, 
 or a relative depreciation of gold of considerably 
 less than 3 per cent. Now, it is alleged by many 
 who have made a study of prices during that 
 period, that in actual value gold depreciated 25 
 per cent. ; so it is plain that it carried down silver 
 with it, and the only logical explanation is that 
 the mints were equally open to both. 
 
 We have seen that in all the century and a half 
 when the mines were pouring forth silver at the 
 rate of from 20 ounces to 1 of gold up to 55 
 ounces to 1, the greatest variation in their value 
 was less than 9 per cent., and in the twenty years 
 when the silver production was to that of gold as 
 less than 5 ounces to 1, the value of gold produced 
 being more than three times that of silver, their 
 money value varied less than 3 per cent., and yet 
 we are coolly asked to believe that since 1873 sil- 
 ver is to be rated among variable commodities like 
 potatoes, the size of the crop each year determin- 
 ing the value. Monometallists have had much to 
 say about the relative cheapness of gold during 
 those years, and have laid much stress upon the 
 
RELATIVE PRODUCTION. 61 
 
 fact that it was an era of great prosperity and 
 rapid development, with rise of wages and the 
 prices of farm produce. In this argument they 
 admit three things : that we have a moral and 
 constitutional right to use the cheaper metal at 
 any time ; that we did use gold for all those years 
 simply because it was easier to pay debts with it, 
 that is, it was cheaper, and that the use of the 
 cheaper metal aided greatly in making prosperity. 
 That is all that any bimetallist claims. As the 
 entire burden was not then thrown upon silver, 
 we claim that it should not now be thrown upon 
 gold, doubling or trebling the rate of its advanc- 
 ing value ; and as the privilege to use the cheaper 
 metal then checked the advance of the dearer and 
 enhanced prosperity, we insist that the system of 
 that time shall be restored. 
 
 The subsequent figures are equally convincing. 
 In 1861-65 the gold products were 72.1 per cent, 
 of the total, the silver 27.9 per cent., the variation 
 in ratio from 15.26 to 15.44. In 1866-70 the pro- 
 duction stood 69.4 to 30.6, the variation in ratio 
 15.43 to 15.60. In 1871-75 production was still 
 58.5 to 41.5, but the variation in coin value was 
 from 15.57 to 16.62. That something had hap- 
 pened quite aside in its effects from relative pro- 
 
62 IF NOT SILVER, WHAT? 
 
 duction was evident, but the people did not find 
 out what it was till late in 1875. At the time the 
 demonetization act was passed, the ratio was still 
 15.55 to 1, and one of the reasons given for the 
 act of February 12, 1873, was that the silver dollar 
 was worth $1.03 in gold; yet before the close of 
 that year, and before it was known that there was 
 to be any great increase in the product of silver, 
 its relative value ran down till it was below that 
 of gold. Can any one doubt the cause ? Surely 
 not if he observes the additional fact that the 
 relative decline of silver continued despite the 
 greater value production of gold, and that 1882, 
 ten years after demonetization, was actually the 
 first year since 1849 in which the world's produc- 
 tion of silver exceeded that of gold. What one 
 hundred and ninety years of continuous and often 
 enormous relative overproduction of silver had not 
 done, ten years of demonetization had accom- 
 plished, and that while the relative supply of gold 
 was still the greater. Is it possible to miss the 
 real cause ? Is there in Euclid a demonstration 
 more conclusive ? 
 
 Monometallists have exhausted the resources of 
 verbal gymnastics to make these figures fit their 
 theories. Determined not to admit that demone- 
 
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BELATIVE PRODUCTION. 63 
 
 tization was the cause, they have given so many 
 explanations that, expressed in the briefest words, 
 they would cover many pages like this. The first 
 was that the opening of the " Big Bonanza " on 
 the Oomstock lode had given notice that silver 
 was coming in a flood; but that was only for popu- 
 lar use in this country. Scientific men knew that 
 to be a rare find indeed, not likely to occur again 
 for centuries. The next explanation was that 
 China and India, so long the reservoir into which 
 the surplus flowed, had ceased to absorb it; and 
 the next, demonetization of silver by Germany 
 and her throwing her old silver on the market. 
 And with this the people began to get at the true 
 reason — the general demonetization by so many 
 nations. 
 
 The following table gives the annual production 
 of gold and silver from the discovery of America 
 to and including the year 1892 ; and the highest 
 and lowest ratio of silver to gold from 1681 to and 
 including the year in which silver ceased to be in 
 this country primary money : 
 
64 
 
 IF NOT SILVER, WHAT? 
 
 YEARS. GOLD. SILVER. RATIO. 
 
 1493-1520 $3,855,000 $1,953,000 
 
 1521-1544 4,759,000 3,749,000 
 
 1545-1560 5,657,000 12,950,000 
 
 1561-1580. ....... 4,546,000 12,447,000 
 
 1581-1600 4,905,000 17,409,000 
 
 1601-1620 5,662,000 17,538,000 
 
 1621-1640 5,516,000 16,358,000 
 
 1641-1660 5,829,000 15,223,000 
 
 1661-1680 6,154,000 14,006,000 
 
 1681-1700 7,154,000 14,209,000 14.81-15.20 
 
 1701-1720 8,520,000 14,779,000 15.04-15.52 
 
 1721-1740 12,681,000 17,921,000 14.81-15.41 
 
 1741-1760 16,356,000 22,158,000 14.14-15.26 
 
 1761-1780 13,761,000 27,128,000 14.52-15.27 
 
 1781-1800 11,823,000 36,534,000 14.42-15.74 
 
 1801-1810 11,815,000 37,161,000 15.26-16.08 
 
 1811-1820 7,606,000 22,474,000 15.04-16.25 
 
 1821-1830 9,448,000 19,141,000 15.70-15.95 
 
 1831-1840 13,484,000 24,788,000 15.62-15.93 
 
 1841-1850 36,393,000 32,434,000 15.70-15.93 
 
 1851-1855 131,268,000 36,827,000 15.33-15.59 
 
 1856-1860 136,946,000 37,611,000 15.19-15.38 
 
 1861-1865 131,728,000 45,764,000 15.26-15.44 
 
 1866-1870 127,537,000 55,652,000 15.43-15.60 
 
 1871-1872 113,431,000 81.849,000 15.57-15.65 
 
 1873 96,200,000 81,800,000 
 
 1874 90,750,000 71,500,000 
 
 1875 97,500,000 80,500,000 
 
 1876 103,700,000 87,600,000 
 
RELATIVE PRODUCTION. 65 
 
 TEARS. 80LD. SILVER. 
 
 1877 114,000,000 81,000,000 
 
 1878 119,000,000 95,000,000 
 
 1879 109,000,000 96,000,000 
 
 1880 106,500,000 96,700,000 
 
 1881 103,000,000 102,000,000 
 
 1882 102,000,000 111,800,000 
 
 1883 95,400,000 115,300,000 
 
 1884 101,700,000 105,500,000 
 
 1885 108,400,000 118,500,000 
 
 1886 106,000,000 120,600,000 
 
 1887 105,000,000 124,366,000 
 
 1888 109,900,000 142,107,000 
 
 1889 118,800,000 162,690,000 
 
 1890 118,848,700 172,234,500 
 
 1891 126,183,500 186,446,880 
 
 1892 138,861,000 196,458,800 
 
 Thus we see that, for twenty-seven years after 
 the discovery of America, the gold production was 
 double that of silver ; for the next eighty years the 
 production of silver was considerably more than 
 double that of gold ; for the next one hundred 
 years the production of silver was more than %\ 
 times that of gold, and for the next century and a 
 half, to wit, from 1701 to 1850, inclusive, despite 
 the fact of the tremendous gain of gold in the last 
 few years, the production of silver fell but little 
 short of twice that of gold. And yet, the varia- 
 5 
 
66 IF NOT SILVER, WHAT* 
 
 tions in coin value were of the trifling character 
 previously stated. When taken by shorter periods, 
 the argument is still more startling. Thus in 
 1801-20 the production was almost exactly 4 of 
 silver to 1 of gold j for the next twenty years a 
 minute fraction less than 2 of silver to 1 of gold ; 
 for the next twenty 2| of gold for 1 of silver ; and 
 for the next twenty nearly 2 of gold for 1 of silver, 
 while during these awful years since 1873, in which 
 there has been so much said about the " flood of 
 silver/' its production has never once been twice 
 that of gold, and for the entire period has exceeded 
 it by the merest trifle. Is it any wonder that Dr. 
 Eduard Suess, the great German authority on the 
 metals, and Professor of Geology at the University 
 of Vienna, concluded his recent work with these 
 strong statements : 
 
 " Present legislative institutions are at variance 
 with the conditions established by nature. Even 
 now agriculture and in part industry in Europe are 
 sorely at a disad vantage against silver countries such 
 as India and Mexico. The advantage of this situa- 
 tion accrues in England to the holders of interest- 
 bearing notes, the productive value of which in- 
 creases with the growing scarcity of gold. . . . 
 As soon as the figure 23.75 shall have been reached, 
 
RELATIVE PRODUCTION. 67 
 
 all gold obligations will have increased in value 
 one-half ; but nothing prevents that figure from 
 rising to 31. [It has since risen even above that. J 
 . . . You say a regulation cannot be interna- 
 tional, but you overlook how long the ratio of 1 to 
 15£ was upheld and worked beneficently. We wish, 
 say the London bankers, to receive our interest in 
 gold and not in depreciated silver ; but silver would 
 not be depreciated the moment an agreement went 
 into effect. Why, you ask, shall we cast such profit 
 into the hands of the owners of silver mines ? 
 Remember that you are now casting the same profit 
 into the hands of the owners of gold mines and 
 washings. No man would lose by rehabilitation, 
 and the whole world would be richer. . . . 
 Europe is laboring under a grave delusion. The 
 economy of the world cannot be arbitrarily carried 
 on in the hope that somewhere a new California, 
 and at the same time a new Australia, will be found 
 whose alluvial lands will give relief for a decade. 
 . . . The question is no longer whether silver 
 will again become a full value coinage metal over 
 the whole earth, but what are to be the trials 
 through which Europe is to reach that point." 
 
 At this point it seems to me well to present the 
 figures of relative production for the last century 
 
68 IF NOT SILVER, "WHAT? 
 
 in a more compact shape, with a view to bringing 
 out the contrast : 
 
 Silver produced 1792-1850 $1,690,217,000 
 
 Gold produced 848,186,000 
 
 Excess of silver production 842,031,000 
 
 Gold produced 1850-73 $2,724,825,000 
 
 Silver produced 1,150,025,000 
 
 Excess of gold 1,574,800,000 
 
 Gold produced 1873-92, inclusive... $2, 060, 897,000 
 
 Silver produced 2,264,419,000 
 
 Excess of silver 203,522,000 
 
 Gold produced 1850-92, inclusive... $4, 785, 722, 000 
 
 Silver produced 3,414,444,000 
 
 Excess of gold 1,371,278,000 
 
 Gold produced 1792-1892, inclusive $5,633,908,000 
 
 Silver produced 5,104,961,000 
 
 Excess of gold 528,947,000 
 
 Thus are we confronted with the truly startling 
 paradox that during all the century and a half 
 when the production of silver was nearly twice 
 that of gold, and the two centuries back of that 
 when it was more than twice, the variation in coin- 
 age value never rose to 9 per cent., and for many 
 years at a time corresponded with the ratio set by 
 the mint ; but at the end of a century during 
 
RELATIVE PRODUCTION. 69 
 
 which the gold production was half a billion greater 
 than that of silver, and at the end of half a cen- 
 tury when it was nearly a billion and a half greater, 
 the really scarcer metal has declined in terms of 
 the other nearly one-half ! And all this, the mo- 
 nometallist tells us, because there has been an ex- 
 cess of silver produced amounting to less than a 
 quarter of a billion in twenty-three years. Belief 
 in such a proposition would indeed be a triumph 
 of faith over figures. And to add to the trial of 
 our faith, we find, on bringing the figures down to 
 the close of the year 1895 — and we cannot bring 
 them later on account of official slowness — the 
 amounts of silver and gold in the world, as pre- 
 sented in values at our ratio, are almost exactly 
 equal, the greatest divergence claimed by the most 
 extreme monometallist being 16^ ounces of silver 
 to one of gold ! 
 
 I do not indulge the hope that the figures herein 
 presented will affect the opinion of any pronounced 
 monometallist. There seems to be a mysterious 
 power in gold which blinds the eyes to deductions 
 from statistics and experience; the internal con- 
 viction of the monometallist that gold stands still 
 while everything else changes in value resists all 
 logic. In this country, that is. In England, 
 
70 IP NOT SILVER, WHAT? 
 
 where it has not become a political question, and 
 no one is interested in denying the facts, monomet- 
 allists almost universally concede the appreciation 
 of gold and defend monometallism on that ground. 
 It is to the laboring producers of the United States, 
 still open to conviction, that I present these figures, 
 which to me seem absolutely conclusive. 
 
IS BIMETALLISM PKACTIOABLE ? 
 
 Can this great nation coin silver and gold on 
 the same terms, at the ratio of 16 to 1, and main- 
 tain a substantial parity ? 
 
 This question, like all others in political econ- 
 omy, may he argued theoretically or on the basis 
 of actual experience. The monometallists say 
 that one metal or the other always has been and 
 always will be the cheaper at any ratio ; that if 
 both be freely coined, the dearer will be more 
 valuable as bullion than as money, and will there- 
 fore go out of use. They say that, in spite of all 
 devices to the contrary, we must have monometal- 
 lism any how, and always on the basis of the 
 cheaper metal. 
 
 The bimetallist replies that such is, in truth, 
 the natural tendency ; but when the dearer metal 
 is thrown out of use as money it thereby becomes 
 cheaper, and as the cheaper metal must take its 
 place, a vastly greater demand for it is created, 
 and so it becomes dearer ; thus an alternating ac- 
 tion keeps the two near a parity, provided that 
 
72 IF NOT SILVER, "WHAT? 
 
 the ratio corresponds nearly with the relative 
 amounts of the two metals in the world's stock. 
 They claim that the world has thus a far less fluc- 
 tuating standard of value than it ever can have 
 with one metal alone. 
 
 The monometallist rejoins that this is "all 
 theory." This hrings both parties to the test of 
 experience, and by common consent the expe- 
 rience of France in the seventy years from 1803 to 
 1873 is taken as the best practical test. At first 
 view, it would seem as if the matter could easily 
 be settled, '.as the time is so recent that there 
 could be no great obscuration of the history •) but 
 on inquiry a determination of the real facts is 
 found to be no such simple matter, and as the 
 disturbance of natural law by war and other 
 causes was almost constant, both sides find enough 
 in the facts to make a basis for their respective 
 contentions. Let us then consider this history. 
 
 Napoleon Bonaparte became First Consul and 
 practically ruler of France in 1799, and at once 
 addressed himself, with his usual energy, to the 
 task of establishing a stable monetary system. 
 He found that in 1785 Oalonne had established 
 the ratio of 15J of silver to 1 of gold, and that it 
 had worked reasonably well. He accepted it, 
 
18 BIMETALLISM PRACTICABLE? 78 
 
 therefore, as justified by experience, and his Fi- 
 nance Minister carried through the Council of 
 State an act for the free coinage of both metals at 
 that ratio. For seventy years this law stood prac- 
 tically unchanged, and it is speaking with great 
 moderation to say that in those seventy years 
 there occurred more disturbance of every kind un- 
 favorable to the maintenance of a ratio than in 
 any other seventy years in monetary history. 
 France was twice conquered, her soil overrun, and 
 her capital held by the enemy. She four times 
 changed her form of government. Once she was 
 subjected to the payment of enormous war expen- 
 ditures, and again not only to the payment of 
 still greater expenditures but to a fine exceeding 
 in amount the largest sum of gold ever held in 
 the United States. During a large part of this 
 time the world's production of silver was in excess 
 of that of gold to an extent very much greater 
 than it has been in recent years, and then, after a 
 very brief interval of something like equal pro- 
 duction, there was a sudden and tremendous in- 
 crease in the production of gold until it exceeded 
 that of silver more than 3 to 1 in value. During 
 these years, also, several of the neighboring nations, 
 including seventy million people, demonetized 
 
74 IF NOT SILVER, WHATf 
 
 gold and threw the whole burden of sustaining its 
 equality on the continent of Europe upon Prance, 
 and during another portion of the time there 
 were monetary disturbances so far-reaching that 
 they shook the foundations of credit in every 
 civilized country in the world. And yet, through 
 all these convulsions, France for seventy years 
 maintained a substantial parity, by welding the 
 two metals together for monetary purposes. 
 
 The contrasted figures are simply amazing. 
 In the decade of 1811-20 there were produced 47 
 ounces of silver to 1 of gold, and yet the market 
 ratio outside of Prance never stood higher than 
 16.25 to 1. In the decade of 1821-30 the produc- 
 tion was 32 ounces to 1 and the average ratio 
 15^/V to 1. In 1831-40 the production was 29 
 ounces to 1 and the average ratio 15^^ to 1. In 
 1841-50 the production was 14^ ounces to 1 and 
 the average ratio 15^^ to 1. The demonstration 
 is as complete as that of any proposition in 
 Euclid. In spite of the enormous overproduc- 
 tion of silver, the maintenance of the mint ratio 
 in Prance held the two so nearly together that in 
 three years out of four the difference in other 
 countries only amounted to the cost of transport- 
 ing the silver to the French Mint and of coinage. 
 
el 
 
 KSHHOHOtOOOM 
 COODCOCOCO GOOD CO00QO 
 
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IS BIMETALLISM PRACTICABLE? 75 
 
 To this should also be added the fact that French 
 coins would have a slightly less value in other 
 countries than the coins of those countries, but it 
 is not easy to estimate the sentimental difference 
 this would make. From the enactment of the 
 law of 1803 to the limitation of the coinage in 
 1875 France coined 5,100,000,000 francs of silver 
 and 7,600,000,000 francs of gold, or $1,020,000,- 
 000 of silver and $1,520,000,000 of gold, very 
 nearly, or 40 per cent, of the total amount of sil- 
 ver and 33 per cent, of the total amount of gold 
 produced in the world during those years. 
 
 It is further to be noted that, whether gold or 
 silver was the dearer metal at the ratio of 15£ to 1 
 at any given time, France at that time had more 
 of gold and silver per capita than any country in 
 the world, and that, despite the enormous inflow 
 of the cheaper metal, she held the dearer and ab- 
 sorbed what now seems an astonishing amount of 
 the cheaper. Thus, in 1822 the imports of silver 
 into France exceeded the exports by 125,000,000 
 francs, and in 1831 the amount had risen to 181,- 
 000,000 francs, and then it fell off and did not 
 reach the latter sum again until 1848. 
 
 On the other hand, in the eight years 1853-60 
 there was a net import into France of gold to the 
 
76 IF NOT SILVER, WHAT? 
 
 value of 3,082,000,000 francs, or $616,000,000; 
 and in the same years a net export of silver to the 
 value of 1,465,000,000 francs, or $293,000,000. 
 Thus in the short space of eight years Prance 
 had made monetary, or, rather, metallic transfers 
 amounting to $909,000,000, and that without a 
 quiver of her financial system, and scarcely a per- 
 ceptible trace of the effects of that financial storm 
 which swept America, England, and Central Eu- 
 rope with such destructive fury in 1857-8. It 
 further appears that, despite the enormous import 
 of gold, the subsequent export was comparatively 
 small, and thus, such was the wonderful absorb- 
 ing power of the nation under the free coinage 
 law of 1803, that France came out of each suc- 
 cessive financial storm with an increased stock of 
 the precious metals, and more than once has the 
 Bank of England been compelled to apply to 
 Prance for the specie to arrest a destructive panic 
 growing out of an insufficient amount of coined 
 money upon a safe basis and an overissue of sup- 
 plemental or faith money. 
 
 By the year 1860 it was supposed that the dan- 
 ger of the world being " flooded with gold " was 
 substantially over ; and during that decade France 
 not only sustained the double standard single- 
 
IS BIMETALLISM PRACTICABLE? 77 
 
 handed and alone, but did it against the tremen- 
 dous pressure due to the demonetization of gold in 
 Austria, Germany, and other countries. It is not 
 possible to say with certainty how far gold would 
 have cheapened, or, to speak in the current lan- 
 guage, how high the ratio of silver would have 
 become, had France during the decade abandoned 
 her bimetallic system ; but it is certain that the 
 disproportion would have been enormous, un- 
 doubtedly very much greater than the present 
 disproportion in the market between silver and 
 gold, resulting from the demonetization of silver. 
 M. Chevalier gave it as his opinion that the ratio 
 would sink at least as low as 8 to 1, that is, that 
 gold would be worth but half what it was rated 
 at in relation tc silver in the American coin- 
 age, and this he believed would certainly happen, 
 despite the power and willingness of France to 
 maintain the old ratio. He did not venture to 
 say how low the ratio would sink if France aban- 
 doned her policy, but he evidently looked forward 
 to a time when gold would be practically too 
 sheap for money. 
 
 Tears afterward, in writing as a philosopher 
 rather than an advocate, he took more rational 
 ground, and compared the action of France to that 
 
78 IP NOT SILVER, WHAT? 
 
 of a parachute which retarded the fall of gold. 
 The maximum effect of the enormous gold infla- 
 tion of 1848-65 was to create a disturbance of less 
 than five per cent, in value of the metals in coun- 
 tries outside of France. During all the years that 
 the law of 1803 was in practical force the varia- 
 tions as shown by a diagram seemed but trifling, 
 despite the enormous over-production of silver for 
 many years and of gold for many other years, and 
 yet, immediately after 1873, although ten years 
 were yet to elapse before the world was to produce 
 silver in excess of gold, almost instantly the dia- 
 gram shows the downward trend of silver far, far 
 in excess of any previous experience. 
 
 How was it through all these years with the 
 industrial and financial condition of France ? It 
 would indeed be little to the purpose to prove that 
 she had maintained the metals at a parity by free 
 coinage, if, in the meantime, her people had 
 suffered loss. Monometallists tell us that not only 
 is bimetallism impossible, but that the attempt to 
 maintain it is in every way hurtful, in fact, disas- 
 trous. They point us to the fact that England is 
 the clearing house of the world ; that those whose 
 currency is not assimilated to that of England are 
 
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 SsoSsss 
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 <u < £■ c o"5 
 rt ■— oo a .s *^ 
 
 »CO§3° 
 043 B« p « 
 
 43 « „ . 
 
 ■SUffl 
 
 
 
IS BIMETALLISM PRACTICABLE? 79 
 
 subjected to enormous losses in the exchange, 
 resulting from fluctuations ; that by attempting 
 bimetallism a nation puts itself in the. second or 
 third rank, and that the results are in every way 
 bad. Well, all those conditions applied to France. 
 She, like the United States, may be considered as 
 regarding England in the light of the world's 
 clearing house, and her currency may be said to 
 have fluctuated, as they declare ours would, with 
 bimetallism. What, then, have been the general 
 results to Prance ? What effect has it had upon 
 her commercial, social, and industrial develop- 
 ment ? On this point let us return thanks that 
 the testimony is universal. No other nation in 
 the world has made such stupendous progress in 
 the general improvement of her people as France 
 has made since 1803. No civilized country 
 probably had sunk to such depths of popular 
 misery as had France at the beginning of her 
 revolution, and we can hardly believe that the sub- 
 sequent fourteen years of war and internal turmoil 
 had greatly improved her condition when the 
 policy of 1803 was adopted. 
 
 Bimetallism and a rigid adherence to a specie 
 basis were two of the means adopted by Bonaparte 
 to restore France, and during all his wars, with 
 
80 IP NOT SILVER, WHAT? 
 
 their terrible expenses, he never once departed 
 from the specie standard. After the Act of 1803 
 France was still to have twelve years of war and 
 severe trial. She has subsequently had two revo- 
 lutions and a foreign war, singularly destructive 
 in its course, and ending in her subjugation, the 
 occupation of her territory, and the loss of two of 
 her wealthiest provinces. 
 
 Seventy years of bimetallism had left France 
 saturated with gold and silver when her Emperor 
 rashly provoked the war with Germany ; her 
 expenses were enormously increased, and she had 
 to pay, in addition, a fine of nearly' $1,000,000,000. 
 She paid it with a rapidity that amazed the world, 
 but in her hour of weakness she consented to gold 
 monometallism. She had become a creditor 
 nation, and could endure the new system better 
 than any other, except Great Britain ; neverthe- 
 less, she has suffered. Her exports had steadily 
 increased during all her years of bimetallism, and 
 never so fast as during the very years in which she 
 was exporting silver so heavily because of the 
 influence of cheap gold. The very year of demon- 
 etization her exports began to decline, and but 
 once since have they reached the old figures. 
 
 The statistics are fearfully suggestive. In 1840 
 
IS BIMETALLISM PEACTICABLE? 81 
 
 her exports were valued at $202,231,000, and her 
 imports at $210,413,000 ; in 1873 her exports were 
 $964,465,000, and her imports $915,285,000, and 
 in only six of the years after she began to be 
 " flooded with cheap gold" did her imports exceed 
 her exports. In 1874 her exports began to 
 decline, and ran rapidly down to $822,360,000 
 in 1878 ; and 1890 is the only year since demone- 
 tization in which they reached the figures of 1873, 
 being $968,030,000. On the other hand, her 
 imports have steadily outrun her exports until the 
 excess has been as high as $300,000,000 in one 
 year (1880), and has only once since (1885) been as 
 low as $100,000,000. Here, then, are the points 
 demonstrated by France's official figures : 
 
 During seventy years of bimetallism she gained 
 steadily and rapidly in wealth, her exports increas- 
 ing much faster than her population. 
 
 During the eight years (1853-60) in which she 
 was " ruined by cheap gold/' importing 3,082,000,- 
 000 francs of it and exporting 1,465, 000,000 francs 
 of silver, a bullion operation to the amount of 
 $909,000,000, she increased her exports most 
 rapidly and with no corresponding increase in 
 imports. 
 
 During the twenty years following demonetiza- 
 
82 IF NOT SILVEE, WHAT? 
 
 tion her exports haye been stationary or declining, 
 being $99,000,000 less in 1893 than in 1873, while 
 her imports have increased. 
 
 Let us turn for a moment and trace the effects 
 of monometallism in England as compared with 
 bimetallism in France daring the same period. 
 
 England had in 1816, when she adopted gold 
 monometallism, about $10,000,000,000 in property 
 and had in 1873 about $40,000,000,000. In 1816 
 she had about 18,000,000 people and in 1873 about 
 32,000.000 ; her per capita wealth, therefore, in 
 1816 was $555, and in 1873 $1,250, or 2£ times as 
 much. In 1803 the property of Prance was valued 
 at $8,000,000,000, and in 1873 at about $40,000,- 
 000,000; in the former year she had 29,000,000 peo- 
 ple, and in the latter a little over 36,000,000. Her 
 per capita wealth, therefore, in 1803 was $276, and 
 $1,081 in 1873, or very nearly four times as much. 
 
 Thus, despite the immeasurable advantages 
 which England enjoyed, political, social, and in- 
 dustrial, her great colonial possessions from which 
 she drew enormous wealth, and her exemption from 
 destructive war ; despite also the distressing con- 
 dition of France and her recent enormous losses, 
 we find that in seventy years of bimetallism the 
 working Frenchman had gained wealth almost 
 
IS BIMETALLISM PRACTICABLE? 83 
 
 twice as fast as the working Englishman had in the 
 same number of years of monometallism. 
 
 Prance became a creditor nation, and yielded to 
 the general pressure for a single gold standard ; 
 she has lost heavily, as shown in her table of ex- 
 ports, but she still retains a large part of the 
 momentum acquired during seventy years of bi- 
 metallism. Her wealth is still rated at something 
 over $40,000,000,000 ; her people have accumulated 
 stocks of the precious metals far in excess of those 
 of any other country ; and their busi ness is so solidly 
 founded that the storm which recently shook the 
 foundations of credit throughout the British Em- 
 pire scarcely produced a quiver in France. They 
 have wisely avoided the excessive issues of faith 
 money (or check money) which are the ever- 
 present danger of England, America, and other 
 monometallic countries ; and as a result, they have 
 almost entirely escaped those fearful convulsions 
 have that threatened the political stability of great 
 nations. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that 
 France has only felt the convulsions of recent years 
 by their reflex action on her from other countries ; 
 and twice within very recent years has the Bank 
 of England been compelled to go to France for the 
 coin to stay the devastating work of panics result- 
 
84 IF NOT SILVER, WHAT? 
 
 ing from over-expansion of faith money on an 
 insufficient metallic basis. 
 
 France has an area less than that of Texas by 
 some 60,000 square miles, yet its aggregate wealth 
 is two-thirds that of the United States ; and on the 
 basis of assessed value her agricultural wealth is 
 very much greater than ours. Mulhall, the great 
 British statistician, says of France that she is " the 
 best cultivated country in Europe." Her 6,000,000 
 peasant proprietors are the owners of nearly all her 
 cultivatable soil, which is worth, on an average, 
 $160 per acre. She has over 400,000 miles of the 
 finest common roads in the world, which have cost 
 her, at the ordinary rate of labor, over $5,000,000,- 
 000. Their benefit goes chiefly to agriculture, 
 binding the farmers of different provinces and 
 farmers and city dwellers together. She has over 
 10,000 miles of canals and canalized rivers ; she 
 has 25,000 miles of railways, all in the highest 
 state of efficiency. She has, during her bimetallic 
 period, become the second colonial power of the 
 world, and has acquired foreign territory at such 
 a rate as to excite the jealousy of England. She 
 has become the second naval power on the globe, 
 and the second exporting nation, her exports aver- 
 aging some $900,000,000 per year, an amount 
 
IS BIMETALLISM PRACTICABLE? 85 
 
 larger than the exports from this country, which 
 has a population nearly double that of Prance, 
 nearly all of it being manufactures ; and had the 
 same rate of growth continued as was maintained 
 before Prance became monometallic, it is fair to 
 presume that her exports at this time would have 
 equalled those of Great Britain. Best of all, the 
 great increase of wealth is in the hands of those 
 who created it. It is the universal testimony of 
 all observers that the condition of the French 
 people and the general aspect of Prance has stead- 
 ily improved throughout this century. It is a 
 country in which poor-houses are unknown ; in her 
 cities a beggar is a curiosity. In their country's 
 emergency the common people came forward and 
 out of their savings paid $1,000,000,000 accumu- 
 lated during the bimetallic period. Despite the 
 loss of $240,000,000 in the Panama Canal and of 
 $1,000,000,000 in the indemnity to Germany, as 
 well as two of her richest provinces, France has 
 accumulated hundreds of millions of dollars in the 
 securities of other countries, and has only recently 
 been able to subscribe twenty-five times over the 
 Eussian loan, and is negotiating a loan to China, 
 the money for which is to be supplied by her work- 
 ing people. 
 
86 IF NOT SILVER, WHAT? 
 
 Be it noted also that the debt of France is 
 held by the people of Prance, largely by the in- 
 dustrial class, and especially by the agricultural 
 class, and the interest thereon paid, instead of 
 being a foreign drain, is a perpetual renewal of 
 the current circulation. 
 
 One more brief contrast between France and 
 England. No reader of current literature need 
 be told of the appalling prevalence of poverty in 
 Great Britain. As France is a country without 
 poor-houses, so it may be said that England is a 
 land of poor rates and poor unions. The latest 
 official announcement is that the agricultural in- 
 terest is declining more rapidly than ever before ; 
 and in regions where only fifteen years ago the 
 land rented readily at several pounds per acre, 
 statesmen and economists are appalled at the 
 sight of that which so alarmed our New Eng- 
 land people a few years ago : the phenomenon of 
 abandoned farms. We are told that there is a 
 revival of industry because British capitalists have 
 withdrawn their money from other countries and 
 will put it in anything rather than have it en- 
 tirely idle ; but the condition of agriculture 
 steadily grows worse. 
 
 And have we anything to boast of in our own 
 
IS BIMETALLISM PRACTICABLE? 87 
 
 happy land in comparison with France ? Our 
 natural resources so far exceed those of any old 
 country that a comparison would be ridiculous ; 
 and the monometallists tell us, when they are 
 trying to prove that gold is not enhanced in 
 value, that, by reason of inventions, a day's labor 
 will produce at least twice as much as in 1870, 
 and in many lines a great deal more than twice 
 as much. Why, then, does not the laborer receive 
 twice as much as he did in 1870 ? As wages are 
 labor's dividend of its own product, and as capital 
 had its dividend then as now, if a day's labor does 
 not bring the laborer twice what it did, he is 
 wronged ; and, considering our resources, if we 
 are not five times as well off as the French peo- 
 ple, the only reason can be that we have slighted 
 our opportunities, and blundered most fearfully 
 in our management. 
 
 The monometallists profess to be great sticklers 
 for experience and demonstrated fact; to have a 
 horror of "theory." We present them the exam- 
 ple of France as an unanswerable proof that one 
 great nation can maintain bimetallism, and that 
 by maintaining it she escaped the worst evils that 
 have affected the monometallic countries, and as- 
 sured for herself an extraordinary progress and 
 
88 IF NOT SILVBE, WHAT? 
 
 prosperity. We present them, in contrast, the 
 example of England, and point them especially 
 to the great difference in the progress of the 
 common people of the two countries. We ask 
 them, with this experience, to consider the pres- 
 ent condition of this country, and the evils that 
 have affected it since 1873, and seriously to con- 
 sider the question as to whether something is not 
 radically wrong ; whether some malign influence 
 has not gone between us and the reward of our 
 work, and robbed us of that to which we are 
 honestly entitled. 
 
BIMETALLISM ABROAD. 
 
 Many monometallists start with the assumption 
 that what they call the "silver craze "is a mere 
 fad, temporary and local ; that the advocates of 
 bimetallism are confined chiefly to the United 
 States, and to the western part of it, and that, 
 if they are thoroughly defeated at the November 
 election, the discussion will be at an end. 
 
 "Mistaken souls that dream of heaven. " 
 
 They do not realize that, although it has not 
 taken the same popular form, the discussion is 
 quite as serious in monometallic Germany and 
 England, and in the latter country opinion has 
 so far advanced that both parties agree on the 
 enormous enhancement in the value of gold. 
 There is now scarcely a difference of opinion in 
 England on this point, but there is as to the 
 effect. British monometallists assert that as Eng- 
 land is a great creditor nation, the world owing 
 her, as estimated, $12,000,000,000, every advance 
 in the purchasing power of money is greatly to 
 
90 IF NOT SILVER, WHAT? 
 
 her advantage. In Mr. Gladstone's last public 
 speech on the subject he stated that fact with 
 great frankness, claiming that it was to Eng- 
 land's interest that money should remain as now 
 in purchasing power, and that if she should 
 abandon the gold basis, because gold is worth far 
 more than it was a few years ago, the world might 
 applaud her generosity, but it would sneer at her 
 wisdom. 
 
 The bimetallists of England, on the other hand, 
 assert that the enormous losses of traders owing 
 to the dislocation of the par with silver-using 
 countries, of manufacturers by reason of the 
 rapidly increasing competition of the same coun- 
 tries, of home debtors and of many other classes, 
 and especially the loss to agriculture, far outweigh 
 any gain made by the creditors as such. 
 
 The national debts of Europe now amount in 
 round numbers to some $22,000,000,000. Includ- 
 ing all other countries, the total of national debts 
 exceeds $26,000,000,000, and the growth for many 
 years averaged $500,000,000 per year. The local 
 public debts of England and Canada are set at 
 $1,735,000,000. According to the best authori- 
 ties, the mortgage indebtedness of the principal 
 European nations is as follows : 
 
BIMETALLISM ABROAD. 91 
 
 For Great Britain and Ireland $8,000,000,000 
 
 For Germany 8,500,000,000 
 
 For France 3,850,000,000 
 
 For Russia 3,250,000,000 
 
 For Austria 1,500,000,000 
 
 For Italy 2,675,000,000 
 
 And for all other European countries. 3,050,000,000 
 
 A total of nearly $31,000,000,000. 
 
 Hon. Samuel Smith, M.P., places the mort- 
 gages of England at something oyer $2,000,000,- 
 000, which is more than half the Talue of the 
 landed property, and those of Scotland and Ire- 
 land (the latter one of the worst mortgaged 
 countries in the world) make up the grand total 
 given above. 
 
 A highly suggestive fact is that, as experience 
 develops the enormous evils of the monometallic 
 system, the number of conversions among promi- 
 nent men to bimetallism steadily increases, and 
 they become more outspoken and radical in their 
 views. 
 
 At the Paris Monetary Conference of 1867, Mr. 
 Mees, President of the Bank of the Netherlands, 
 protested against a single gold standard and fore- 
 told literally what has followed. Two years later 
 Baron Alphonse de Eothschild said : " As a sequel 
 
92 IF NOT SILVER, WHAT? 
 
 we should have to demonetize silver completely. 
 That would be to destroy an enormous part of the 
 world's capital ; that would be ruin." 
 
 At the conference of 1878, Mr. Henry Hucks 
 Gibbs, director and former governor of the Bank 
 of England, was an advocate of the single gold 
 standard ; but a few years' experience so com- 
 pletely changed his views that he said : " Mr. 
 Goschen and I were together in the conference in 
 Paris ; both of us were sturdy defenders of gold 
 monometallism ; but I have changed my mind. 
 I do not say Mr. Goschen has changed his mind, 
 but he has somewhat modified it." 
 
 In the Paris Conference of 1878, Mr. Goschen 
 said : "If other states were to carry on a propa- 
 ganda in favor of a gold standard and of the 
 demonetization of silver, the Indian Government 
 would be obliged to reconsider its position, and 
 might be forced by events to take measures 
 similar to those taken elsewhere. In that case 
 the scramble to get rid of silver might provoke 
 one of the gravest crises ever undergone by 
 commerce/' 
 
 As it is the fashion of our monometallists to 
 sneer at the possibility of bimetallism, it may be 
 well to quote here the report of the Eoyal Com- 
 
BIMETALLISM ABROAD. 93 
 
 mission on gold and silver, made in 1888. This 
 commission was composed of six monometallists 
 and six bimetallists, but they assented unani- 
 mously to this proposition : 
 
 "Sectiojst 107. "We think that in any condi- 
 tions fairly to be contemplated in the future, so 
 far as we can forecast them from the experience 
 of the past, a stable ratio might be maintained 
 if the nations we hare alluded to (herein), the 
 United Kingdom, the United States, and the 
 Latin Union, were to accept and strictly adhere 
 to bimetallism at the suggested ratio. We think 
 that if in all these countries gold and silver 
 could be freely coined and thus become exchange- 
 able against commodities at the fixed ratio, the 
 market value of silver as measured by gold would 
 conform to that ratio and not vary to any con- 
 siderable extent." 
 
 Mr. Leonard H. Courtney, one of the mono- 
 metallist members of that commission who signed 
 the report, has since become an avowed bimetallist, 
 as have many other prominent Englishmen. 
 Among them may be mentioned Professor Alfred 
 Marshall and Professor Sidgwick, of Cambridge 
 University ; Professor Nicholson of Edinburgh ; 
 Professor H. S. Foxwell. Professor of Political 
 
94 IF NOT SILTEE, WHAT? 
 
 Economy in University College, London ; Pro- 
 fessor B. G. Gonner, of Liverpool ; Professor J. 
 E. Munro, of Kings College, London ; and many 
 others. 
 
 Mr. Courtney says, in his article in the Nine- 
 teenth Century, April, 1893 : " Is it true that 
 gold is this stable standard ? I was one of the six 
 members of the Gold and Silver Commission who 
 could not see their way clear to recommend bi- 
 metallism, and reported : ' When we .look at the 
 character and power of the fall in the price of 
 commodities, we think that the sounder view is 
 that the greater part of the fall has resulted from 
 causes touching the commodities rather than from 
 an appreciation or increase in value of the stand- 
 ard/ In the same paragraph we had said : ' We 
 are far from denying that there may have been, 
 and probably has been, some appreciation in gold, 
 though we may hold it impossible to determine its 
 extent.'" Wow, then, he goes on to say : "Let 
 me make a confession. I hesitated a little about 
 this paragraph. I thought there was perhaps 
 more in the suggestion of an appreciation of gold 
 than my colleagues believed ; but while I thus 
 doubted it, I did not dissent. I am now satisfied 
 that there has been an appreciation of gold greater 
 
BIMETALLISM ABKOAD. 95 
 
 than I anticipated when I signed the report, and I 
 should not be able to concur in that same para- 
 graph again. We have been passing through a 
 period of an appreciation of gold, and no one can 
 tell how long it will last. This is a serious mat- 
 ter. The pressure of all debts, private and pub- 
 lic, has increased. The situation is serious. It 
 is a dream to suppose that gold is stable in value. 
 It is no more stable than silver. It has undergone 
 a considerable appreciation in recent years, and in- 
 dustry and commerce have been more hampered 
 by this movement than they would have been had 
 silver been our standard. Every step taken towards 
 the further demonetization of silver must tend to 
 the enhancement of the value of gold. It is true 
 that much inconvenience is involved in the use of 
 gold as a standard in some countries, and of silver 
 as a standard in others, with no link to check their 
 divergent relations ; but the advantage of having 
 the same monetary standard throughout the world 
 would be counterbalanced if we made gold that 
 universal basis and tied all the fortunes of the 
 nations to it." 
 
 The bimetallic sentiment in England is not 
 confined to the mere theorist and doctrinaire or 
 statesman, but is advocated by some of the ablest 
 
96 IF NOT SILVER, WHAT? 
 
 journalists in the kingdom. Thus, the Statist, 
 which undoubtedly ranks in that country as the 
 highest authority in financial and economic mat- 
 ters, is quite as pronounced as Mr. Balfour and 
 others in its views upon the effect the demone- 
 tization of silver has had upon the value of gold. 
 In its issue of July 1, 1893, it says : " The new 
 policy is likely to intensify the appreciation of 
 gold. One consequence of the further apprecia- 
 tion of gold will be to intensify the agricultural 
 depression all over Europe. Most of the charges 
 upon land having been fixed heretofore, they will 
 weigh more and more heavily upon land-owners as 
 gold rises in value. So, again, rents will become 
 more onerous, and it will be found by and by that 
 the settlement of the last few years was only pro- 
 visional, and that a further reduction will become 
 necessary. Also it is evident that the burden of 
 debt, not only upon individuals, but upon govern- 
 ments, will be much increased. Everywhere the 
 burden of debt will necessitate increased taxation, 
 and so will weigh very heavily upon the general 
 population." 
 
 Hon. Eobert GifEen, the well-known chief of 
 the statistical department of the Board of Trade, 
 London, was long known as the most determined 
 
BIMETALLISM ABROAD. 97 
 
 and uncompromising monometallist in England. 
 In 1888 he read a paper before the Eoyal Statistical 
 Society, in which he showed that gold had notably 
 gone up in purchasing power ; that the increase 
 was continuous and likely to continue, and that 
 this was the true explanation of the fall in the 
 prices of commodities. 
 
 In a former paper read in 1879 he had predicted 
 the rise in the purchasing power of gold, and in 
 his paper of 1888 he said : " If the test of prophecy 
 be the effect, there was never surely a better fore- 
 cast. The fall of prices in such a general way as 
 to amount to what is known as rise in purchas- 
 ing power of gold is, I might almost say, universally 
 admitted. Measured by any commodity or group 
 of commodities usually taken as the measure for 
 such a purpose, gold is undoubtedly possessed of 
 more purchasing power than was the case fifteen 
 or twenty years ago, and this high purchasing 
 power has been continued over a long enough 
 period to allow for all minor oscillations." 
 
 In 1871, when the discussion may be said to 
 have begun, the French economist Ernest Seyd 
 pointed out very plainly that the adoption of the 
 gold standard by Europe and the United States 
 would lead to the destruction of the monetary 
 7 
 
98 IF NOT SILVEE, WHAT? 
 
 equilibrium hitherto existing, and then added this 
 singular prophecy : " The strong doctrinarianism 
 existing in England as regards the gold valuation 
 is so blind that when the time of depression sets 
 in the economic authorities of that country will 
 refuse to listen to the cause here foreshadowed. 
 Every possible attempt will be made to prove that 
 the decline of commerce is due to all sorts of 
 causes and irreconcilable matters. The workman 
 and his strikes will be the first convenient target ; 
 then speculating and over-trading will have their 
 turn ; many other allegations will be made, totally 
 irrelevant to the real issue, but satisfactory to the 
 moralizing tendency of financial writers." 
 
 How literally has that been fulfilled in our 
 sight. At this very time, the monometallists of 
 the United States are pointing to all sorts of 
 causes and irreconcilable matters to explain the 
 ruinous fall in prices. They not only allege all 
 the causes here assigned, but many more peculiar 
 to this country ; and, after the fashion of all who 
 oppose any reform in the interests of producing 
 labor, they particularly and even savagely depre- 
 cate agitation. 
 
 By the way, does not every clear-headed Ameri- 
 can know that any system that cannot stand agita- 
 
BIMETALLISM ABROAD. 99 
 
 tion is totally unfitted to this country ? Agitation, 
 investigation, public discussion in the papers and 
 on the stump, are the very life-blood of our insti- 
 tutions. And if our finances were as they should 
 be, the more thoroughly they were discussed, the 
 more warmly would the system be approved, and 
 the more would investigation be invited. 
 
 Hon. Gr. J. Goschen, former Chancellor of the 
 Exchequer, pointed out as early as 1883 that the 
 enormous increase in the demand for gold conse- 
 quent upon the demonetization of silver was liable 
 to create great evil. After elaborating this sub- 
 ject, and saying that the fall in prices had already 
 produced serious evils, he added : " Some writers 
 have appeared to show something approaching to 
 irritation at the view of the situation that gold 
 should have largely influenced prices. I scarcely 
 know why, unless through the apprehension that 
 the bimetallists may utilize the argument/' A 
 little later he said: "I must repeat that to my 
 mind the connection between the additional 
 demand for gold and the fall of prices seems as 
 sound in principle as I believe it to be sustained 
 by facts." 
 
 We might multiply at length quotations to show 
 that opinion is unanimous in England, regardless 
 
100 IF NOT SILVEK, WHAT? 
 
 of party, to the effect that there has been a great 
 increase in the purchasing power of gold. As to 
 the effect of this Mr. Griff en says : " The weight of 
 all permanent burdens is increased. . . . Our 
 people, in paying annuities or old debts, have to 
 give sovereigns, which each represent a greater 
 quantity of the results of human energy. The 
 debtors pay more than they would otherwise, and 
 the creditors receive more. It is a most serious 
 matter to those who have debts to pay." 
 
 Mr. S. Dana Horton says that on the basis of 
 prices "The national debt, regarded as a principal 
 sum, has increased its weight upon the shoulders 
 of the British taxpayer between 1875 and 1885 
 by nearly two hundred millions sterling, an 
 amount nearly equal to the Franco-German war 
 fine." 
 
 This gives us the explanation of the fact that 
 the consols on which the interest was reduced by 
 Mr. Goschen, when Chancellor of the Exchequer, 
 to 2| per cent., are now selling at a much higher 
 premium than formerly ; the smaller amount of 
 money paid in interest will purchase a very much 
 larger amount of commodities than the former 
 larger interest did. 
 
 The matter is very clearly set forth by Hon. 
 
BIMETALLISM ABKOAD. 101 
 
 Samuel Smith, M.P. : " If the question of protec- 
 tion is to be introduced into the discussion, then 
 it will be found to tell more forcibly against our 
 opponents. What do they seek for, but the protec- 
 tion of gold as against silver ? They wish, as far as 
 lies in their power, to boycott silver and throw the 
 world upon gold alone, even though such a course 
 should change the value of gold. In trying to 
 boycott silver, they are giving protection to the 
 wealthy capital class, just as truly as the old corn 
 laws did to the landed owners of this country. 
 The only difference is that the amounts involved 
 are much larger and the protected class much 
 richer and the confiscation of the fruits of the 
 toiler much greater than under the old system of 
 the corn laws. When the masses of this country 
 awake as those of America have awakened to the 
 magnitude of this question, they will brush away 
 this idle talk that we are trying to restore protec- 
 tion." If Mr. Smith were in Congress instead of 
 Parliament, what a howl there would be about 
 him as an anarchist ! 
 
 It being now the unanimous opinion of English 
 statesmen and financiers that gold has greatly 
 appreciated, and that such enhancement has 
 already wrought great evil, the important ques- 
 
102 IF NOT SILVER, WHAT? 
 
 tion arises, Will this process continue ? In the 
 speech already quoted Mr. Giffen says : "I am 
 bound to say that all the evidence seems to me 
 to point to a continuance of the appreciation. It 
 is impossible to suppose that the movement will 
 not extend to other countries. All these facts 
 point to a continued pressure on gold. The bet- 
 ter probability seems to be, that the increase of 
 the purchasing power of gold will continue from 
 the present time." 
 
 The Eight Hon. A. J. Balfour, now the head of 
 the British Cabinet, in a speech delivered at Man- 
 chester, October 27, 1892, said : "We want two 
 things of our currency. We require that it shall 
 be a convenient medium of exchange between dif- 
 ferent countries, and we require of it that it shall 
 be a fair and permanent record of obligation over 
 long periods of time. In both of these great and 
 fundamental requirements of a currency, our ex- 
 isting currency totally and lamentably fails." 
 After showing that within fifteen years the money 
 of Great Britain and Ireland had advanced in pur- 
 chasing power no less than 30 or 35 per cent., he 
 went on to say that of its further progressive 
 appreciation "No living man can prophesy the 
 limit." A little later he spoke of it as progres- 
 
BIMETALLISM ABROAD. 103 
 
 sing "steadily, continuously, indefinitely," and 
 closed his remarks on that subject in these words : 
 " If you will show me a system which gives abso- 
 lute permanence, I will take it in preference to 
 any other. But of all conceivable systems of cur- 
 rency, that system is assuredly the worst which 
 gives you a standard steadily, continuously, indefi- 
 nitely appreciating, and which by that very fact 
 throws a burden on every man of enterprise, upon 
 every man who desires to promote the agricultural 
 or industrial resources of the country, and benefits 
 no human being whatever but the owner of fixed 
 debts in gold." 
 
 In his work " The Bimetallic Question " Hon. 
 Samuel Smith, M.P., presents as an evidence of 
 the hardships due to the increasing purchasing 
 power of money these facts : " The English land- 
 lords who borrowed £400,000,000 on their prop- 
 erty, agreeing to pay, let us say, £16,000,000 a 
 year, interest at 4 per cent., supposing that it 
 represented one-quarter of their rents, now find, 
 owing to the fall of prices, that it represents one- 
 third, or even in some cases one-half of their rent. 
 . . . The factory owner, the mine owner, the 
 ship owner, who thought it safe twenty years ago 
 to borrow half the value of his plant in order to 
 
104 IF NOT SILVEE, WHAT? 
 
 find capital for his business, now finds that the 
 mortgagee is the virtual owner. Nearly all the 
 profits go to pay the mortgagee's claim, and in 
 many cases he has foreclosed, and sold out the un- 
 happy borrower, ruined through no fault of his 
 own, but through the extraordinary sinking of 
 prices. As a matter of fact, I believe that if all 
 the fixed capital engaged in trade in England 
 could be valued to-day at its real selling price, it 
 would be found that it would do little more than 
 pay the mortgages and debts upon it. Trade is 
 very greatly and injuriously affected by sudden 
 alterations in the standard of value, especially 
 when the alteration is, as now, towards increased 
 values. It arises in this way : trade is largely car- 
 ried on by borrowed capital, or, in other words, 
 by the use of credit in some shape or other ; the 
 vast banking deposits are mainly loaned to trad- 
 ers ; a very great deal of the invested capital of 
 this country is lent upon mortgages upon trading 
 property such as ships, factories, and warehouses. 
 A prudent trader usually considers it safe to draw 
 considerably beyond his floating capital, and to 
 borrow say 50 per cent, upon his plant or a fixed 
 capital. Now, the constant decline in prices 
 within the last few years has virtually swept away 
 
BIMETALLISM ABROAD. 105 
 
 his own portion of the capital, and only left him 
 enough to pay the loans and mortgages. For in- 
 stance, a ship or a factory built at a cost of twenty 
 thousand pounds, of which ten thousand were 
 borrowed, is now worth only twelve thousand 
 pounds, or 40 per cent, less ; and so the mortgage 
 represents five-sixths of the value instead of one- 
 half, the trader's interest having sunk to two thou- 
 sand pounds in place of ten thousand. Probably, 
 if trade is unprofitable, he fails to pay the interest 
 and the mortgage is foreclosed ; the property is 
 forced off at just sufficient to cover the loan and 
 he is ruined. I have no doubt that this exactly 
 describes the condition that confronts numbers of 
 traders in this country and other countries hav- 
 ing the gold standard. A great portion of the 
 commercial capital of the country has passed into 
 the hands of the mortgagees and bondholders who 
 have neither toiled or spun. The discouragement 
 this state of things produces is intense. After it 
 has gone on for several years, a kind of hopeless- 
 ness oppresses the commercial community, all en- 
 terprise comes to a standstill, many works are 
 closed, labor is thrown out of employment, and 
 great distress is felt, both among laborers and the 
 humbler middle class. Indeed, it strikes higher 
 
106 IF NOT SILVER, WHAT? 
 
 than this ; for multitudes of people who were 
 once prosperous traders have now become de- 
 pendent on charity. I know many such myself." 
 
 How fitly that describes the condition of the 
 United States to-day. This was written some 
 years ago, and so rapid has been the subsequent 
 decline in prices that it almost equals the decline 
 he had estimated for the fifteen or twenty years 
 preceding the date of his work. And the end is 
 not yet. 
 
 In his comments upon Mr. Goschen's address, 
 delivered in 1883, wherein he pointed out that in 
 the decade from 1873 to 1883 the annual supply 
 of gold had decreased in a marked degree, and 
 concurrent with this there was a marked increase 
 in the demands upon the world's stock of gold, 
 which was intensified by the substitution of gold 
 for silver as money in Germany and other countries, 
 Mr. Smith makes the following observations : 
 " The gold production, which for some years ex- 
 ceeded £30,000,000 annually, has fallen to 19,- 
 000,000 a year ; and the best continental au- 
 thorities, such as Soetbeer and Laveleye, reckon 
 that more than half that amount is consumed in 
 the arts. 
 
 " It may, therefore, be reckoned that since 1873 
 
BIMETALLISM ABROAD. 107 
 
 only some 10,000,000 on the average has been 
 available for currency purposes. 
 
 " But Germany during that period has intro- 
 duced a gold currency of 80,000,000, the United 
 States has used up 100,000,000, and Italy 
 has drawn some 20,000,000 for a similar pur- 
 pose. 
 
 "So that 200,000,000 have been drawn for 
 these special purposes, whereas the whole supply 
 of new gold for coinage has not exceeded in that 
 time 130,000,000. 
 
 " The balance must have been drawn out of 
 existing stocks. Besides, a steady drain of some 
 4,000,000 a year has gone to India, further 
 depleting stock in Europe. 
 
 " While trade and population constantly grow 
 and demand more metallic currency, there is a 
 steadily diminishing quantity to meet it. If you 
 put the present product of gold at £19,000,000 a 
 year, and the requirements of the arts at 8,000,- 
 000 or 10,000,000 a year, while the India de- 
 mand is 4,000,000, there is only left 5,000,000 
 to 7,000,000 a year for Europe, America, and the 
 British Colonies. 
 
 " It will seem to subsequent ages the height of 
 folly that just at this period, when gold was run- 
 
108 IF NOT SILVER, WHAT? 
 
 ning short, the chief states of the world decided to 
 close their mints against silver, and cut off, so to 
 speak, one-half the money supply of the world from 
 performing its proper functions. 
 
 " Had the world continued to use both metals 
 as freely as before, the painful crisis we have passed 
 through would have been much mitigated. But 
 by a suicidal policy silver was cut off at the very 
 time it was most needed, and a double burden 
 thrown upon gold just when it was able to bear 
 only half of its former burden. 
 
 "As Bismarck has well said, two men were 
 struggling to lie under a blanket only big enough 
 for one." 
 
 Bad as have been the effects of monometallism 
 in England, they have been far worse in Ireland ; 
 and dark as is the future of the former, it is light 
 itself compared with that evidently in store for 
 the latter. Those familiar with Irish affairs know 
 that after a long agitation several acts have been 
 passed to enlarge the rights of tenants and to 
 secure them a larger share of what they produce. 
 The Act of 1881 reduced the rents and fixed the 
 amount to be paid at a specific annual sum in 
 money for a long term of years ; and the subse- 
 quent Ashbourne Act (so called from Lord Ash- 
 
BIMETALLISM ABROAD. 109 
 
 bourne, who introduced it) gave tenants a chance 
 to buy and pay for lands in fixed yearly install- 
 ments for forty-nine years. The intent was to 
 create a peasant ownership somewhat like that of 
 Prance. It was the end of a long fight, and was 
 supposed to be a great victory and the inaugura- 
 tion of a very great reform. 
 
 Scarcely, however, was the great victory won 
 and the great reform inaugurated when it became 
 evident that, owing to the demonetization of silver 
 and increased purchasing power of gold, the ten- 
 ants were, in reality, bound to much heavier pay- 
 ments than before. Whatever may have been the 
 intent, the tenant, who bound himself to pay a 
 fixed annual sum as rent for a long term of years, 
 found himself bound to deliver a much larger 
 share of produce ; and the purchaser under the 
 Ashbourne Act found that what looked so easy in 
 figures soon became impossible in fact, as the 
 prices of his produce fell so rapidly that each 
 successive payment became more oppressive until 
 it finally became impossible. Thus it looks now 
 as if by the appreciation of gold all that was 
 gained for the tenant is more than lost, and that 
 in the future his condition may be worse than in 
 the worst days of rack-renting. In recent years 
 
110 IF NOT SILVER, WHAT? 
 
 this has hecome plain to those who have the good 
 of Ireland at heart ; they have taken the alarm, 
 and are outspoken on the threatening evils. 
 Among these is the Most Keverend Dr. "Walsh, 
 Archbishop of Dublin. In a recent interview he 
 says, referring to the rise in the value of gold : 
 
 " All this is indisputable ; it is now fully in the 
 public view ; yet not even an attempt is being 
 made in Parliament, or even out of it, to bring 
 about an equitable readjustment of the conditions, 
 which are proving so disastrous in other nations, 
 conditions too that are imposed under the provi- 
 sions of statutes enacted as measures of protection 
 for the tenants. The Irish Land Acts of 1881, 
 1885, and 1891 have, nevertheless — as a result of 
 the increased and increasing value of our present 
 unbalanced and consequently untrustworthy mon- 
 etary standard of value — become fruitful sources 
 of difficulty, and may very soon become fruitful 
 sources of disaster, to those for whose benefit they 
 were intended." 
 
 Again, referring to the importance of some 
 remedy, possibly that which bimetallism might 
 provide, he says : 
 
 "The adoption of bimetallism or of some 
 equivalent remedy, if there be any equivalent 
 
BIMETALLISM ABROAD. Ill 
 
 remedy, is, I am convinced, a matter of im- 
 perative necessity ; that is, if the agricultural 
 tenants of Ireland — and I do not limit this to 
 Ireland — are to be saved from otherwise irretriev- 
 able ruin. If things go on as they are, even the 
 excellent land purchase scheme, which is asso- 
 ciated with the name of Lord Ashbourne, may 
 become, before many years are over, a source of 
 widespread disaster to the tenants who have pur- 
 chased under it." 
 
 Again, in view of the steady and dangerous in- 
 crease in the burdens of the obligations entered 
 into under either of the acts referred to, by rea- 
 son of the continued enhancement in the price of 
 gold, he says : 
 
 " The bimetallists may be right or they may be 
 wrong ; but, at all events, if tbey are right, then 
 it is noticeably plain that the Irish tenants who 
 have the misfortune to have their rents fixed for 
 terms of ten or fifteen years under the Act of 1881, 
 and in much the same way the Irish tenant pur- 
 chasers who have the misfortune to have found 
 themselves saddled with the obligation of making 
 annual payments fixed for forty-nine years, are 
 simply sliding down an inclined plane with bank- 
 ruptcy awaiting them at the bottom of it." 
 
112 IF NOT SILVEE, WHAT? 
 
 And again : 
 
 " The point, as I have already stated it, is that 
 so long as our monetary system remains what it is, 
 every one who is placed under an obligation to 
 make yearly payments of a fixed amount of money 
 is thereby placed under a burden which is growing 
 heavier from year to year." 
 
 In discussing the question of variability in the 
 purchasing power of gold, he says : 
 
 "The reason of the liability to fluctuation in 
 the purchasing power of the sovereign is plain : 
 "When gold rises in value a larger quantity of any 
 other commodity, say of corn, of meat, of butter, 
 or of cloth, will have to be given in exchange for 
 any given quantity of gold, such, for example, as 
 the quantity contained in a sovereign. On the 
 other hand, when gold falls in value a Bmaller 
 quantity of any other commodity, say of corn, of 
 meat, of butter, or of cloth, will suffice to obtain 
 in exchange any given quantity of gold, such 
 as that which is contained in the sovereign. It is 
 an obvious inference that our gold coinage, how- 
 ever useful as a medium of exchange, does not 
 furnish us with a standard of value fixed and un- 
 alterable. It does not furnish us, for example, 
 with such a standard as the yard is of length or 
 
BIMETALLISM ABROAD. 113 
 
 as the pound troy is of weight. The popular 
 notion that the pound sterling constitutes a fixed 
 standard of value is merely a popular delusion. 
 The sole foundation for that delusion manifestly is 
 that in these countries the values of all commodi- 
 ties are commonly stated in terms of a pound ster- 
 ling ; in other words, in pounds, shillings, and 
 pence ; a shilling being a twentieth part of the 
 pound, and a penny the twelfth part of that 
 again. 
 
 " The natural result of this method of enhanc- 
 ing the value of commodities other than gold is 
 that when prices rise or fall the impression is con- 
 veyed to a superficial observer that it is the value 
 of other things that changes, the value of the 
 sovereign remaining fixed." 
 
 Under this head he says again : 
 
 "The price of things estimated in gold — their 
 gold price — may change, whilst their price esti- 
 mated in silver — their silver price — remains unal- 
 tered. This will occur if the value or purchasing 
 power of gold goes up or down, while the value or 
 purchasing power of silver remains unaltered. 
 Suppose, for instance, that gold is in any way 
 scarce in relation to the demands upon it. Then, 
 
 in any country where gold is the standard metal of 
 8 
 
114 IF NOT SILVER, WHAT? 
 
 the currency, those who wish to obtain a certain 
 quantity of gold, whether in coin or in bullion, 
 will have to give a larger quantity of other com- 
 modities in exchange for it ; or, to put the matter 
 in another light, those who have only a definite 
 commodity to part with will receive less gold in 
 return for that ; in other words, there is a fall in 
 gold prices. Suppose, on the contrary, that gold 
 is abundant in relation to the demands upon it, 
 then those who wish to obtain a certain quantity 
 of gold, whether in currency or in bullion, will 
 not have to give so large a quantity of other com- 
 modities to obtain the quantity of gold they re- 
 quire ; or, to put the matter as before in another 
 light, those who have a definite quantity of other 
 commodities to dispose of will obtain more gold 
 in return for them ; in other words, there is a rise 
 in gold prices. If in either case there is no 
 change in the value of silver, then the price of 
 commodities stated in silver, that is, their silver 
 price, will remain unchanged." 
 
 In referring to the very prevalent notion, espe- 
 cially among the uneducated classes, that the gold 
 unit of measure of value does not vary, he says : 
 
 "As for the tenant purchaser, he probably 
 thinks that after the extra pressure of the first 
 
BIMETALLISM ABROAD. 115 
 
 few years he may look forward to easy times for 
 the rest of his life. He little knows what is be- 
 fore him. If things go on as they are, it will be 
 harder for him, ten or fifteen years hence, to pay 
 forty pounds a year than it would be to pay fifty 
 pounds a year now ; but of all this he knows noth- 
 ing — how could he ? His only idea is that a pound 
 is always a pound, and a sovereign is always a 
 sovereign ; so, in the belief that the yearly pay- 
 ment, when it is reduced to forty pounds, will be 
 well within his reach, he puts his head into the 
 halter." 
 
THE "DUMP" OP SILVER. 
 
 All the world will dump its silver on us if we 
 adopt free coinage, says the monometallist. How 
 much, and where will it come from ? asks the bi- 
 metallist. Oh, the world has billions of it ready 
 for us, is the vague general reply ; but when we 
 ask for a bill of particulars we get instead a fine 
 confusion of prophecy. 
 
 One answers that it will come from Spanish 
 America. But we have already shown that all 
 nations from the Rio Grande to Cape Horn have 
 but $1.00,000,000 for their 60,000,000 people. 
 The South Americans have but 83 cents apiece. 
 The Mexicans have $4.54. The Central Amer- 
 icans have $2.14. And the South Americans have 
 $550,000,000 in paper money, to bring which to 
 par and maintain it there will require at least 
 $300,000,000 more in silver than they now have. 
 No "dump" from there. 
 
 From Prance, says another. Well, Prance has 
 $487,000,000 in silver coin, and some bullion ; only 
 $12. 94 per capita in coin, and valued at 15 J to 1 
 
THE "DUMP" OF SILVER. 117 
 
 of gold. At her ratio an ounce is worth $1.3336 ; 
 at ours $1.2929. "Will she rob herself of coin, 
 when she has none too much for business, and 
 sell it to us at a loss of 4 cents on the dollar and 
 freight charges ? Germany has but $215,000,000 
 in silver coin, less than half as much as Prance, 
 though having 13,000,000 more people, and Great 
 Britain has but half as much as Germany. All 
 the other Europeans together have much less 
 than these three nations, and used at a higher 
 valuation than ours. How then can they 
 " dump " any on us ? 
 
 Prom India, say a few. Well, India has a deal 
 of silver — $950,000,000, according to our Director 
 of the Mint. But she has 296,000,000 people, so 
 it is but $3.21 apiece. And the best evidence 
 that she has not too much is found in the fact 
 that she is importing more. China has but $2.08 
 per capita ; Japan has but $4, and is importing 
 heavily ; Australia but $1. 49, and the black and 
 brown races still less. In short, all the world out- 
 side of the United States has but $3,444,900,000 
 in silver coin, or $2.46 per capita. It is a plain 
 case that there will be no "dump" from the 
 coined silver. 
 
 But the bullion, the old silver, the scrap heap, 
 
118 IF NOT SILVER, WHAT? 
 
 will they not ship that to us by billions ? Well, 
 how much is there, and where is it ? Will the no- 
 bility and gentry of Europe melt down their fam- 
 ily plate, the plain people everywhere their silver 
 ornaments, and the Hindoos their household gods, 
 to send us the silver ? If so, why did they not do 
 it when a cup, a watch, or a silver god would buy 
 twice as much gold as now ? But the supposition 
 is absurd. The manufactured articles are worth 
 very much more than the metal in them, to say 
 nothing of the sentimental value. A prize silver 
 cup, for instance, won in a great race or regatta, 
 could not be bought for ten times its weight in gold. 
 There remain, then, only the scrap heap and the 
 stored bullion, and nobody has been able to locate 
 any great mass of it. Is it reasonable to suppose 
 that moneyed men have been storing away silver 
 for years, making no profit on it and losing the 
 interest, and doing it in the face of a falling 
 market ? No, the timid may be reassured ; there 
 will be no "dump." 
 
 Another class threaten us that a great mass of 
 securities will be "unloaded on us." Well, Great 
 Britain, Germany, and Holland, all gold countries, 
 are the nations which hold practically all the 
 American stock and bonds held abroad. Of 
 
119 
 
 course they did not invest expecting to be paid 
 principal and interest in coin, for they know that 
 there is not enough in this country to pay it; 
 it is in commodities that we must pay. So far as 
 these securities are bad, as we are sorry to say very 
 many are, foreigners having been badly "plucked" 
 by some of our operators, they will be returned 
 anyhow. In fact, they are coming back now. As 
 to those which are good, being held against prop- 
 erty capable of earning a steady and reliable in- 
 come, they will not be returned. Held in gold 
 countries, the interest and dividends on them will 
 be paid in our products measured in the currency 
 of those countries, no matter what our monetary 
 system may be. 
 
 But suppose the "prophets " of evil are correct 
 to this extent that silver and securities will be 
 " dumped " on us to the amount of a billion or 
 two. Will the foreigners give us all these good 
 things ? Assuredly not. They must all be paid 
 for ; and with what ? Manifestly with agricultural 
 products, for there is little or nothing else. The 
 farmer must furnish the stuff, and he is ready and 
 willing to do it — yes, anxious. At least three- 
 fourths of our exports are agricultural, and of the 
 new exports probably seven-eighths would be. We 
 
120 IF NOT SILVEE, WHAT? 
 
 find, moreover, that in 1891 55,131,948 bushels 
 of wheat exported brought us $51,420,272, and in 
 1892, 157,280,351 bushels brought us $161,399,- 
 132, while in 1894 the 88,415,230 bushels exported 
 brought us only $59,407,041, and in 1895, 76,- 
 102,704 bushels brought us but $43,805,663. 
 Similarly it may be shown that our largest cotton 
 exports have brought us the least money ; but this 
 is an old story. It goes without saying, that to 
 the farmer there are three great factors in the 
 present situation : a ruinously low price for his 
 products, a tremendous surplus left over from last 
 year, and an immense crop for this year now add- 
 ing to the surplus, with no possible home con- 
 sumption to give an adequate outlet. Suppose 
 then the "dump" should come and the farm 
 produce go — what then ? 
 
 First of all there must come as a result a rise in 
 prices. Farmers receiving much more money 
 would immediately pay their most pressing debts ; 
 the release of idle money would break the dead- 
 lock which now paralyzes trade, and from the 
 farmer the money would at once be poured into the 
 channels of rural business. The consumptive de- 
 mands would be tremendous because of the long 
 and forced abstinence, and the farmer would sup- 
 
THE "DUMP" OF SILVER. 121 
 
 ply himself with those things he has so long 
 wanted. The railroads would have a vastly in- 
 creased business, and as a result there would be a 
 greatly increased demand for labor. Instead of 
 the ruinous "cut in rates" which we read of 
 almost every day, made in order to stimulate the 
 movement of crops, we should soon hear of vastly 
 increased shipments at profitable rates ; these of 
 course would soon he followed by increased net 
 earnings, which would in time create increased 
 values of securities, which again would check 
 foreign sales, and stimulate purchases. There 
 would be a boom in stocks to dispel the gloom of 
 Wall Street, and we should do the money-mongers 
 good in spite of themselves. 
 
 Is this all supposition ? Well, we are proceeding 
 upon the theory of the monometallists, that a 
 billion dollars' worth of silver and securities would 
 be shipped here. We are showing what must 
 inevitably result if their predictions should hold 
 good — more money for the farmers, more business 
 for the merchants, more transportation for the 
 railroads, and more business for their correlated 
 industries ; and, as a result, more work, abundant 
 work, for those now idle. And this last would be 
 the greatest blessing of all. The benefit would be 
 
122 IF NOT SILVER, WHAT? 
 
 to the farmer, the handlers of grain and all who 
 serve them, to the retail tradesmen, the small 
 manufacturers, all the country artisans immedi- 
 ately dependent upon the farmer, and all those 
 who supply all of these classes. In short, there 
 would be a general quickening of all branches of 
 production and trade as a certain result of the 
 transfer of foreign silver and securities for onr 
 agricultural surplus. Is there anything in all 
 this to alarm Americana ? 
 
ASIA'S DEMAND FOE THE PEEOIOUS 
 METALS. 
 
 Among the many errors which distort men's 
 opinions on the so-called "silver question" is the 
 belief that the gold supply of the present and 
 near future need be considered merely as it may 
 afEeet Europe and America. Asia and Africa are 
 in most men's minds entirely excluded from the 
 calculations. The popular belief in the United 
 States may be briefly stated thus : Asia is and is 
 long to be the land of stagnation. Asiatics are 
 unprogressive and will remain so. In contact 
 with the higher civilization of Europe the yellow 
 and brown races are likely to fade away as did 
 the Maori and the American Indian ; or if they 
 continue to increase, their trade and government 
 will be conducted chiefly by Europeans. 
 
 One finds this belief expressed in many stand- 
 ard works. " The helpless apathy of Asi- 
 atics" is a favorite phrase of Macaulay. "Man 
 is but a weed in those vast regions," says 
 DeQuincey. "In Asia there are no questions, 
 
124 IF NOT SILVER, WHAT? 
 
 only affirmations," says another philosopher. 
 And no amount of experience seems to shake 
 the popular faith in this notion that what Asia 
 was she is always to be. And yet enough has 
 occurred within the memory of men still middle- 
 aged to dissipate it. Only a few years ago Ameri- 
 cans looked upon Eussia as an inert mass, semi- 
 barbarous in large part ; and when Kennan 
 pictured the horrors of Siberia most readers 
 thought the condition only such as might be 
 expected from such a government and such 
 people as they believed the Eussians to be. But 
 Eussia is to-day one of the world's greatest 
 powers, with 120,000,000 of people, building the 
 two longest railways in the world, developing the 
 Siberian and Transcaspian region with a rapidity 
 only exceeded in our own far West, and drawing 
 gold from this country and western Europe at a 
 rate that threatens the stability of our financial 
 system. 
 
 It is only forty-one years since our Commodore 
 Perry astonished the world by securing admission 
 to Japan and proving to the western people that 
 it was at least worthy of their notice, yet that 
 empire has undergone a most beneficent revo- 
 lution in which the Daimios or local lords con- 
 
ASIA'S DEMAND. 125 
 
 sented to a self-sacrifice without a parallel in 
 history, has been the victor in a great war, has 
 adopted the best features of the western civiliza- 
 tion while sacrificing none of its own, and is ad- 
 vancing in material development with a rapidity 
 rarely equalled and perhaps never excelled. Five 
 years ago the first complete census showed thirty- 
 six cotton factories with 377,970 spindles ; three 
 years later the number of factories had doubled 
 and that of the spindles had much more than 
 quadrupled, and there is every indication that 
 next year's tabulation will show a still more rapid 
 increase. In 1894 there were 17,000 people em- 
 ployed in that industry. 
 
 Hon. KobertP. Porter, who has recently returned 
 from Japan, after making a thorough study of 
 her progress and resources, tells us that while her 
 export of textiles of all kinds in 1885 was worth 
 but $511,990, they were in 1895 worth $22,177,- 
 626, the estimate of both years in silver dollars. 
 Similarly in the same years the exports of raw 
 silks increased from $14,473,396 to $50,928,440, 
 of grain and provisions from $4,514,843 to $12,- 
 723,771, of matches from $60,565 to $4,672,861, 
 of porcelain, curios, and sundries from $2,786,- 
 876 to $11,624,701, and several other articles in 
 
126 IF NOT SILVER, WHAT? 
 
 the like proportion, while the commerce for 1895 
 showed an increase of $30,000,000 over 1894, 
 reaching a total of exports and imports of $296,- 
 000,000, or about $7.50 per capita. 
 
 The government granted 2,250,000 yen as a 
 bounty to the first iron works, begun in 1892, and 
 already the products of those iron works in hand- 
 made articles are underselling American products 
 on our Pacific coast. In five years, prior to 
 those covered by Mr. Porter's figures above, 
 Japan's exports rose from 34,800,000 to 68,400,- 
 000 yen, and her imports from 27,000,000 yen to 
 64,000,000 yen. Nor does there appear any reason 
 to doubt the confident statement of British ex- 
 perts that development for the coming years 
 will go on much more rapidly. Politics in the 
 empire already turns upon fiscal and economic 
 questions ; of two bills urged in the Imperial 
 Parliament by the progressists, one decrees the 
 nationalization of all railways not yet owned by 
 the state, and the other asks for an appropriation 
 of 50,000,000 yen for the building of a new rail- 
 road. While this is going through the press it is 
 announced that Japan has established two new 
 steamship lines, one running from Yokohama to 
 our own Pacific coast, and the other from Yoko- 
 
ASIA'S DEMAND. 127 
 
 hama to Marseilles, stopping at Shanghai, Hong 
 Kong, Singapore, and Columbo. 
 
 The -western mind has long looked upon China 
 as given over to hopeless inertia and stagnation, 
 but China has awakened at last. In one year the 
 importation of illuminating oil rose 50 per cent., 
 of window glass 58 per cent., of matches 23 per 
 cent., and needles 20 per cent. In six years the 
 tonnage of vessels discharging in Chinese ports 
 rose by one-third. While these lines are going 
 through the press Li Hung Chang is in Europe 
 negotiating for a loan of 400,000,000 francs to be 
 expended in internal improvements, and he gives 
 the weight of his very high authority to the state- 
 ment that China is no longer opposed to the intro- 
 duction of railways. 
 
 Consul-General Jernigan reports to the De- 
 partment of State that the prospectus of a new 
 industry is now before the public at his station, 
 Shanghai. It is called the Shanghai Oil Mill Com- 
 pany, and purposes to manufacture oil from cotton 
 seed. It is the logical result of the cotton mills 
 at Shanghai, and the consequent stimulus given 
 to the cultivation of cotton in China. Since 1890 
 there have been forty-five new manufacturing 
 plants established in Shanghai. They are all in 
 
128 IF NOT SILVER, "WHAT? 
 
 successful operation , especially the cotton factories, 
 in which large capital is invested. He adds : 
 
 " The area suitable for cultivation of cotton in 
 China is almost as limitless as the supply of labor, 
 and labor being very cheap, there can be no doubt 
 that China will soon be one of the great cotton- 
 producing countries of the world, and that this 
 product, produced and manufactured in China, 
 will command serious consideration in all calcula- 
 tions with reference to the cotton market. It will 
 not be safe to discount the cotton of China because 
 it now grades low, for it is certain to improve. At 
 present it is estimated there are 3,000,000 tons of 
 cotton seed, equal to 90,000,000 gallons of oil, 
 now yearly lost to commerce which would find a 
 ready market. The company will start with a 
 capital of 250,000 Mexican dollars. One com- 
 pany has already ordered its machinery from the 
 United States." 
 
 The population of the Chinese Empire is esti- 
 mated at 400,000,000, but Li Hung Chang de- 
 clares, and experienced western observers confirm 
 it, that the country with modern improvements 
 could sustain more than twice its present popula- 
 tion in a very high state of comfort. 
 
 Of all the popular errors, however, the greatest 
 
Asia's demand. 129 
 
 is that of regarding India as an overpopulated, 
 stagnant, and unprogressive land. Suffice it to 
 say here that the population has trebled under 
 British rule, and that the country is abundantly 
 able to sustain in great comfort twice its present 
 numbers by agriculture alone ; that the exten- 
 sion of the railway system has recently been rapid, 
 and along with this has gone on a growth of man- 
 ufactures that is simply amazing. Only recently 
 Burmah borrowed in London $15,000,000 for rail- 
 way construction, a sum that was subscribed in 
 that market five times over. In these vast fertile 
 regions, which in comparison with what they are 
 destined to be might be called new and undevel- 
 oped, live 290,000,000 of people, who are increas- 
 ing at the rate of something like 2,000,000 per 
 year. And these are but a few of the facts I might 
 present to show that the early development of the 
 Orient is the great fact America must take into 
 account, and that it is almost a certainty that the 
 world's greatest possible production of gold in the 
 future may be absorbed in the East, leaving the 
 West to struggle with an increasing scarcity. In- 
 deed, Prof. Bduard Suess, the great German 
 authority, after giving reasons for his belief that 
 the larger part of the gold product is used in the 
 
130 IF NOT SILVER, WHAT? 
 
 arts, and that all of it will soon be, points out that 
 Asia will soon, in all probability, absorb almost 
 the entire silver product, and that we shall then 
 have a "crisis" indeed. 
 
 In my travels through India and the Orient 
 generally I took notice of her enormous capacity 
 to export wheat. As a result, I predicted that 
 the export, then but fairly begun, would soon 
 menace our supremacy in the British market. I 
 began at the same time to study the social and 
 industrial condition of Eussia, and was soon satis- 
 fied that she was in the dawn of a great day. I 
 predicted the eastern extension of her enterprises, 
 and increased political influence, especially with 
 China, and the consequent absorption of western 
 gold and capital generally. It appears from the 
 latest summary of the United States Bureau of 
 Statistics that Eussia had, on the first of January, 
 1893, $324,828,300 in gold in her banks, and on 
 the last of last May $424,193,700. If she carries 
 out her present policy, this is less than half of the 
 amount she will require. On a strictly gold basis 
 we must allow her at least $10 per capita, which 
 would make for the empire $1,200,000,000. But 
 if we greatly reduce the per capita, in view of the 
 undeveloped condition of her subjects, the amount 
 
ASIA'S DEMAND. 131 
 
 still to be required will be enormous. During the 
 same four years and five months the Bank of 
 Prance has increased its holdings of gold from 
 $260,888,299 to 1391,519,658 ; the Austrian-Hun- 
 garian Bank from $26,634,400 to $133,006,312, 
 and the Bank of England from $109,342,800 to 
 $232,791,709, while the Banks of Germany, Bel- 
 gium, Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands have 
 also increased their holdings some $30,000,000. 
 Thus we see that in these few years the leading 
 nations have added nearly $500,000,000 to their 
 previous hoards of gold, which shows too plainly 
 that they are looking forward to a gold famine. 
 How much more will Asia demand ? In my 
 opinion, India, notwithstanding British rule and 
 influence there, has developed less rapidly than 
 China will when she once comes into as intimate 
 contact with western nations as has India, for the 
 rigid system of caste which prevails in India and 
 which does not exist in China has been and will 
 be the cause of greater immobility. It is not pos- 
 sible to say how long it will operate as an im- 
 pediment to a high industrial development, but 
 from the lessons taught in other countries where 
 race and religion create similar castes, we may 
 believe in its long continuance. I take pleasure 
 
132 IF NOT SILVER, "WHAT? 
 
 at this point in referring to the late able work of 
 Prof. Charles H. Pierson, of Oxford, who passed 
 twenty years in the Orient. In his " National 
 Life and Character " he points out that China in 
 1844 had doubled her population in eighty years, 
 and there since has been a great increase ; that 
 Bussia has doubled since 1849, very largely by 
 natural increase, the Eussian peasant being the 
 most prolific of human beings; and the Hindoos, 
 who had doubled in eighty years, have recently 
 gained 20,000,000 in ten years. 
 
 Professor Pierson also points out the great error 
 of assuming that the black and yellow races will 
 fade away before the white, and shows it to be far 
 more likely that with the increased security af- 
 forded by British and Eussian rule they will in- 
 crease so rapidly as to industrially force the white 
 race back to the higher latitudes of the north 
 temperate zone. Industrial commonwealths will 
 not dispense with great armies — at least not for a 
 long time — but China has passed the militant age, 
 and reached the purely industrial. It may be said 
 that work is a pleasure to the Chinese, as active 
 sports are to Western people. Continuous toil is 
 looked upon as a matter of course. To them it 
 does not seem a hardship that men should work. 
 
ASIA'S DEMAND. 133 
 
 As a measure of the possibilities of the Orient, 
 consider what has been done in the western 
 world within half a century, where the population 
 is much less than one-half of that of the far East. 
 Oyer four hundred thousand miles of railroad 
 have been constructed, together with a vast, 
 almost incalculable system of telegraphs, to say 
 nothing of the great cities and common roads, or 
 the enormous mass of productive machinery, 
 which has even outrun the increase of population. 
 
 In round numbers, some forty thousand mill- 
 ions in capital have been absorbed in railroads 
 alone. Add the amount absorbed in telegraphs, 
 telephones, steamships, and electric plants, and a 
 thousand and one appliances of civilization, and 
 the total is beyond comprehension. And all these 
 things have yet to be created and adopted in the 
 Oriental countries. How rapidly the development 
 may go on there, and what an enormous mass of 
 capital will be absorbed, is clearly indicated by 
 what has been done in a very few recent years. 
 And so far we have left Africa entirely out of the 
 account, a country with a vast population and 
 richly dowered with natural resources and with a 
 capacity for rapid development. 
 
 Possibly the Orientals will not suddenly become 
 
134 IF NOT SILVER, WHAT? 
 
 progressive to the degree here anticipated, though 
 Russia's eastern march has fairly rivalled our 
 western march; and it must be borne in mind 
 that to develop the appliances of western civiliza- 
 tion we had all the experiments to make, all the 
 crude preliminary work to do in creating the sys- 
 tem, which the Orient will receive from us in its 
 present perfected form, and be able to go on with- 
 out any mistakes, and thus enable them to adopt 
 within a very brief time that which we gave the 
 labors of several generations to discover, develop, 
 and apply. 
 
 How enormous, then, will be their absorption of 
 western capital and gold. 
 
 Is it still maintained that the Orientals lack the 
 capacity for such development ? Then look at 
 their achievements in every country to which they 
 have emigrated, and especially in this. Their prog- 
 ress here in the industrial arts, even while they 
 were but a handful, was so rapid that the govern- 
 ment was called on to restrict them. Even now 
 the papers contain alarming statements to the 
 effect that Japan is invading our markets with 
 those specialties in the making of which we, but 
 a little while ago, considered ourselves superior to 
 all the rest of the world. And no tariff is high 
 
Asia's demand. 135 
 
 enough to keep them out. It is observed by all 
 travellers in China and other Oriental countries 
 that there exists in as great a degree as in the West 
 a desire for indulgence in those things classed 
 as mere luxuries which, in all nations, absorb so 
 great a share of its total wealth. Every one who 
 travels through the eastern countries marvels at 
 the extraordinary richness and delicacy of those 
 things adopted by them for ornamentation, luxury, 
 and convenience. And they are of such a charac- 
 ter as, far more than in the western world, in- 
 volves the consumption of the precious metals. 
 Along with the national desire to adopt that which 
 is useful and ornamental, a highly mimetic nature 
 prompts them to seize upon and adapt with singu- 
 lar readiness that which is brought to their notice 
 as being useful and constituting a salient feature 
 of western civilization. 
 
 To sum it all up, we have in Asia somewhere 
 near 800,000,000 of people, who are certainly in- 
 creasing by 10,000,000 a year, probably many 
 more, and these people pressed on by Eussia on 
 the north and west, by Great Britain and France 
 on the south, as well as by the wonderful energy 
 of the Japanese on the east. How much gold will 
 all these people absorb in the future ? And it 
 
136 IF NOT SILVER, "WHAT? 
 
 should not be forgotten that not only is the pres- 
 ent population to be supplied, but an increase of 
 population is to be allowed for, which at ten dollars 
 per capita would alone absorb the entire annual 
 gold production above the amount used in the 
 arts. If any one thinks this forecast fanciful, I 
 only ask him to consider what has been done in 
 the last thirty years, and then make his estimate. 
 For what the possible absorption of the precious 
 metals by the Asiatic people may be, we need 
 only to refer to what has been done by India. By 
 reason of the development of her industries and 
 resources caused by her intercourse with west- 
 ern nations she has imported in net excess of ex- 
 ports, from the years 1835 to 1893, $750,000,000 of 
 gold and $1,?50,000,000 of silver, or about one- 
 seventh of the entire world's output of gold and 
 about one-half of the world's output of silver dur- 
 ing that time. Professor Shaw is authority for the 
 statement that her demand for the precious metals 
 is yet unabated and great as ever. When we re- 
 member that the average population of India 
 during this time was only about 200,000,000, and 
 that there are about three times as many people 
 yet in Asia who have even greater latent powers to 
 absorb the precious metals, one can form some 
 
Asia's demand. 137 
 
 feeble estimate of what an exhaustive drain upon 
 the gold and silver supply of the world will ensue 
 when these nations awaken and develop their re- 
 sources and energies through the stimulating in- 
 fluences of western ideas and example. 
 
 Having considered the possible momentous ab- 
 sorption of the precious metals by the Asiatics, it 
 may be well to consider what Europe itself is 
 likely soon to do in the same line. England, 
 Prance, and Germany are the three most substan- 
 tial and commercial nations of Europe, and their 
 experience may be taken as an index. We find 
 that these three use on an average $16.40 per 
 .capita of gold. To give the same to the rest of 
 Europe, including Eussia and Turkey, will require, 
 in addition to their present stock, $3,780,000,000 
 in gold, or nearly as much as the entire world's 
 present stock of gold coin. 
 
 If the example of France and the Netherlands 
 — two of the soundest and most conservative 
 nations in the world — be similarly taken as an in- 
 dex to the probable use of silver, it appears that 
 these two nations average $12.50 per capita. To 
 supply the rest of Europe to the same extent will 
 require an addition of $3,563,000,000 to her pres- 
 ent stock of silver, or about three-fourths as much 
 
138 IF NOT SILVEE, "WHAT? 
 
 as the present coined silver of the world. la view 
 of these facts, is not the real question, not whether 
 there is gold enough, but whether there is both 
 gold and silver enough for the future monetary 
 requirements of the world ? Does it not seem 
 that the nations are soon to be confronted with 
 this dilemma : that the product of the precious 
 metals must be greatly increased — and is that pos- 
 sible ? — or that for the want of gold and silver 
 there must be a serious check to the progress of 
 civilization ? 
 
B