gound TVloney league 
 of Pennsylvania. 
 
 DOCUMENT NO. 2. 
 
 ADDRESS OF 
 
 Hon.GeorgeF.Edmunds 
 
 DELIVERED BEFORE THE 
 
 Sound Money meeting 
 
 HELD IN THE 
 
 Academy of Music, Philadelphia, 
 
 Nlay 28, 1895, 
 
 AND THE 
 
 RESOLUTIONS THEN ADOPTED. 
 
 PHILADELPHIA: 
 
 Sound Money League of Pennsylvania, 
 The Bourse. 
 
ADDRESS 
 
 Hon. George F. Edmunds. 
 
 The following is the address on the subject of 
 “ Sound Money,” delivered by the Hon. George F. 
 Edmunds, at the public meeting held in the Academy 
 of Music, Philadelphia, May 28, 1895 : — 
 
 Mr. Chairman and Fellow-citizens of Philadelphia :— 
 I say “ fellow-citizens of Philadelphia,” because in our 
 country, as it is now organized, every citizen of the United 
 States who happens to be in it is a citizen also; and I do 
 not address the ladies by name because, also, in this happy 
 country of ours, ladies are themselves fellow-citizens—and 
 there are many of us who would be glad to have them vote 
 upon the silver question and all other questions, for then every 
 question which had received their fair support would be¬ 
 come a question of gold. 
 
 I feel deeply honored in having the pleasure to-night of 
 an opportunity of speaking to an audience like this, com¬ 
 posed, as I know it is, of representatives of every department 
 in the walks of life in this great, homogeneous and industri¬ 
 ous city; a city which, more than any other city with which 
 I am acquainted, represents the frugality, the prosperity, the 
 morality and the progress necessary to the welfare of man. 
 We have met to-night to consider a question that must be 
 decided by political action; I do not mean party action, but 
 that kind of political action that the Romans used to speak 
 of, when no man was for a party, but all were for the State. 
 And what I shall have to say will not be what is ordinarily 
 
4 
 
 called oratory—I am not capable of it; whether glad or sorry 
 is another question—but what I shall have to say will be to 
 tell you some plain facts, historical in respect of the progress 
 of our own country on these questions of money, and histori¬ 
 cal in respect of the sad experience that others have had by 
 trying similar experiments. 
 
 jefferson’s opinions. 
 
 I wish, then, to begin by quoting from Thomas Jefferson; 
 what he said was the true principle and the true art of govern¬ 
 ment. He said, “ The whole art of government consists in 
 the art of being honest.” That phrase of one of the illustri¬ 
 ous founders of our Republic is worthy to be written in 
 letters of gold, and of silver, and of copper, and of iron, and 
 of granite, and placed in the front of every public edifice in 
 every city and hamlet and district of the United States; for 
 the government that conducts its affairs upon the principle 
 that the art of government is the art of being honest and true 
 and just, will be a government whose people will prosper 
 under a sway that is always benign. 
 
 This question of the silver dollar, which is, sometimes by 
 politicians and more often by demagogues, referred to as 
 “ the dollar of the fathers,” is one that engaged the attention 
 of Jefferson and Madison and Hamilton and all the worthies 
 who founded our Government, when, having established our 
 independence, a national money was to be brought into 
 existence. Mr. Jefferson said, in a carefully prepared report 
 for the benefit of the Congress of the United States, then 
 just about to be first assembled, that the question of the 
 difference between the value of gold and silver as money 
 was purely a commercial question; that it did not depend 
 upon the will of legislative law, that it did not depend upon 
 the fancy of man or the taste of man, but upon the same 
 laws of commerce that everywhere regulate the price of every 
 commodity. 
 
 I will read the following extracts from Jefferson’s works. 
 I need not say they are not garbled or twisted. They state 
 as they read, just what he meant:— 
 
5 
 
 Jefferson Papers , (Vol. I, Edition 1829, page 133). “In 
 fixing the unit of money, these circumstances are of principal 
 importance:— 
 
 “ 1. That it be of convenient size to be applied as a measure 
 to the common-money transactions of life. 
 
 “ 2. That its parts and multiples be in an easy proportion 
 to each other, so as to facilitate the money arithmetic. 
 
 “ 3. That the unit and its parts or divisions be so nearly of 
 the value of some of the know 7 i coins as that they may be of 
 easy adoption for the people. 
 
 “ The Spanish dollar seems to fulfill all of these conditions.” 
 
 Page 137. “If we determine that a dollar shall be our 
 unit, we must then say with precision what a dollar is. This 
 • coin as struck at different times, of different weights and 
 fineness, is of different values.” 
 
 He then gives the weights of four different silver dollars, 
 ranging from 387 grains pure silver, to 308.7 grains. 
 
 Page 138. “The proportion between the value of gold and 
 silver is a mercantile problem altogether. * * * * The 
 
 legal proportion in Spain is 16 for i ; in England, 15^ for 
 1 ; in France 15 for 1. The Spaniards and English are found 
 by experience to retain an over-proportion of gold coins, and to 
 lose their silver. The French have a greater proportion of 
 silver. The difference at market has been on the decrease. 
 The financier states it at present at 1 \]/ 2 for 1. Just principles 
 will lead us to discard legal proportions altogether; to inquire 
 into the market price of gold in the several countries with 
 which we shall principally be connected in commerce, and 
 to take the average from them. Perhaps we might with 
 safety lean to a proportion somewhat above par for gold 
 considering our neighborhood and commerce with the 
 sources of the coins, the tendency which the high price of 
 gold in Spain has to draw thither all that of their mines, 
 leaving silver principally for us and other markets.” 
 
 After further discussion of alloys, weights, etc., he says: 
 4t To appoint also proper persons to inquire what are the 
 proportions between the values of fine gold and fine silver at 
 the markets of the several countries with which we are, or 
 
6 
 
 probably may be, connected in commerce; and what would 
 be a proper proportion here, having regard to the average of 
 their values at those markets and to other circumstances, 
 and report the same to the committee,” etc. 
 
 Now, was Jefferson right or wrong? There is nothing 
 sacred, there is nothing magical, there is nothing difficult to 
 understand about the metal that we call gold; there is nothing 
 difficult to understand about the metals that we call silver, or 
 copper, or iron, or zinc, or lead, or the coal in the mountains 
 of Pennsylvania that furnish the motive power for more than 
 half of the industries of the United States. It is like every 
 other thing that bountiful nature gives to man as the return 
 that he is to receive for . industrious labor; and it is in 
 demand, and it carries its price, just as everything else. 
 These two metals, gold and silver, were taken for the chief 
 money of the United States as they were for the chief money 
 of all other countries, for the simple reason that, they being 
 rare, the production of them was more limited and steady, 
 and they were less destructible; and, therefore, if the coins 
 were made of those metals, the variation in the commercial 
 value of the metals would be less likely to change than by 
 a greatly increased or a greatly diminished product of any 
 other. 
 
 Mr. Jefferson said in this paper, which was made for the 
 benefit of Congress in respect to the law of 1792,when the silver 
 dollar, the gold eagle and so on, were first established, that 
 “ It becomes a question of what ratio shall exist between the 
 two metals.” That ratio, he said over and over again (and 
 no man in those days in any country ever disputed it), 
 depended upon their commercial price—upon the average of 
 all the markets of the world. Accordingly, Congress passed 
 the Act of 1792, establishing our first silver dollar the aver¬ 
 age in weight of pure silver of the half dozen coinages of 
 silver dollars that were in circulation in Europe issued by the 
 different countries, making 371^ grains—it is not necessary 
 now to go into minute details—the amount of pure silver that 
 should be in a silver dollar; and that in the gold eagle there 
 should be 247.50 pure gold, thus making the pure silver in 
 
7 
 
 a dollar equal to 24^ grains of pure gold; the ratio of the 
 two metals being such that fifteen pounds of pure silver 
 should be represented by one pound of pure gold; and this 
 for the reason, as I have said, that that was the market ratio 
 of the price and value of those metals, taking the average 
 of all the principal countries of Europe where they were in 
 use, and where they were in the market. 
 
 Now, if Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton and all 
 the other great men of that day, agreeing with all the opin¬ 
 ions and all the experience of the civilized countries of the 
 globe, were right in saying that the ratio that should exist 
 between silver and gold, when they were to be used as 
 money and made compulsory legal tender, depended upon 
 the relative rate of their commercial value, why is it not true 
 to-day? Truth never changes. The truth of 1792 is the 
 same truth that exists in 1895. No man disputes that, not 
 even our silver friends—for whom I have respect. 
 
 SILVER men’s FORMER OPINIONS. 
 
 Senator Jones in his report to the Senate, March 2, 1877, 
 p. 9, from the Monetary Commission, says: “ There can 
 never be practically two money standards whose units of 
 count differ in value in any country at the same time. It is 
 of importance that the value of the standard should be 
 unchanged. 
 
 “ Whenever under the double standard there is a variance 
 between the legal and market relations of the metal, the 
 standard would be practically based on one metal, and it the 
 cheaper and more available one. Whenever the legal and 
 market relations of the metals coincide, there would be a 
 duality in the material and standard, but unity in its value, 
 which would make it in its all-important feature a single 
 standard.” 
 
 You see from this, that the most intelligent of the extreme 
 silver men of this country states fully and broadly precisely 
 the substance of what Mr. Jefferson stated to be a universal 
 truth. The single standard does not by any means require 
 that silver shall not be used in the payment of debts, etc., 
 
but it should be used at what it is worth—measured by the 
 most unchangeable standard known among men, and that is 
 the standard of gold. 
 
 THE FORMER RATIO. 
 
 The silver men are entitled to their opinions; and if they 
 can maintain them and can prove them to be for the good of 
 the country, so much the better for them, particularly if they 
 happen to own silver mines or wish to pay their debts at 
 50 per cent, discount. And so the Spanish milled dollar 
 was taken as the representative, and the relative weight of 
 the two metals established. The effect of that was to create 
 what we call a “ double standardthat is, both coins were 
 legal tender, at the weight ratio of 15 to 1, and only made 
 that because that was what they did represent. You could 
 go into the market and buy one pound of gold with fifteen 
 pounds of silver, or you could buy fifteen pounds of silver 
 with one pound of gold, just as, for illustration, you can go 
 into the market to-day and exchange twenty-five barrels of 
 flour for twenty-five pairs of boots, or any thing else that 
 you want by using money for the exchange ; because all the 
 use of money as money, as we all know, is a mere means of 
 exchanging the things we have for things that we want. 
 That is all there is of money as money; all the rest of it, so 
 far as coin goes, is the metal, which measures the value of 
 the money; and metal is merely a thing to be bought and 
 sold for the uses to which it can be put. In this way our 
 fathers arranged the matter of this so-called “ double stand¬ 
 ard,” in such a way that a silver dollar was worth just one- 
 tenth of a gold eagle, and a gold eagle was worth just ten 
 times the amount of a silver dollar. Just as long as the 
 values of the amount of metal in those two coins remain the 
 same a double standard is just as good as a single standard. 
 But whenever you have two commodities—even metals like 
 gold and silver, whose production was in. those. da.\;s, so, 
 steady and so uniform—you are likely to have changes in 
 relative value. It only took a very few years to have our 
 fathers and their successors in the Government discover that 
 
9 
 
 gold and silver as metals were drawing apart in the value 
 ratio of 15 to 1, and that gold had become less valuable in 
 proportion to silver; and, consequently, as early as 1806, 
 only fourteen years after these two metals were established 
 at 15 to 1, Mr. Jefferson, then President of the United 
 States, through Mr. Madison, then Secretary of State, was 
 compelled to issue—as the law authorized him to do—a 
 proclamation suspending the coinage of the silver dollar at 
 the mints, for the reason that silver, being more valuable, all 
 left the country as metal, although it was in the form of a 
 silver dollar, with the imprint of the American eagle, or the 
 head of Liberty, or whatever the device at that time was 
 upon it, and was selling in the foreign markets as more valu¬ 
 able than gold at the ratio of 15 to 1. 
 
 And yet our silver friends, when they passed what is 
 called “ the Bland Bill ” to restore the coinage of the silver 
 dollar, complained that it had been the wicked Congress of 
 1873 that had cheated the country by demonetizing the 
 “ Dollar of the Daddies,” as they called it. 
 
 They did not seem to know that only fourteen years had 
 passed from the establishment of this ratio when our fathers 
 saw that the two metals were departing from each other in 
 value. They had then only departed by one or two per cent., 
 but that was sufficient to drive one of them into the market 
 as metal and to leave the other to do the business of the 
 country alone. 
 
 A CHANGE IN RATIO. 
 
 That suspension of silver coinage continued until about 
 1834, when the pendulum of the ratio swung the other way. 
 A law was then passed changing the ratio, so as to bring the 
 metals together again, although the difference had been only 
 one, two or three per cent., a difference that nobody in the 
 ordinary transactions of life would notice at all. And it was 
 only few years afterward when there was another slight 
 change the other way, and the thing was reconstructed, as it 
 always ought to be, and honestly must be, if you are to have 
 the double standard, before any serious injury could arise to 
 the community in any business transactions great or small, 
 
10 
 
 from the building of railroads and the establishment of steam¬ 
 ships down to the smallest wage-earner that sweeps the 
 streets. Even copper, abundant as that was and used as a 
 subsidiary coin in small transactions, had so changed in its 
 value as a metal that Congress was compelled, and compelled 
 wisely, to change the amount of copper in the penny of the 
 United States in order to keep it in circulation, otherwise it 
 would all have been taken up just as the copper which did 
 not have the imprint of the United States had been, to be 
 turned into the mechanical business uses of copper. 
 
 THE VALUE OF A GOVERNMENT STAMP. 
 
 It seems to me, therefore, my fellow-citizens, that, if there 
 is any faith to be put in human experience, the truth of what 
 I have said is that you cannot, by the mere will of Congress 
 or the mere will of any body of men, make a given amount 
 of silver, or a given amount of gold, or a given amount of 
 copper, worth any more when it is printed at the mint with 
 the stamp of the United States upon it than it was worth 
 before. All that the stamp of the United States says upon 
 the dollar, or the eagle or the penny, is the simple fact that 
 it is a testimony that there are so many grains of fine gold, 
 or fine silver, or copper in the coins, and they are legal ten¬ 
 der. They are not promises of the United States to pay 
 anything, but it is merely a stamp upon a piece of metal; 
 but that metal being thus stamped, the compulsory law says 
 must be taken by every creditor from his debtor at what is 
 printed upon its face, a dollar or an eagle, or a half eagle, or 
 a fifty-cent piece, or a twenty-five-cent piece or a penny. So 
 you will see that, so far as the mere money part of this metal 
 goes, and its compulsory legal tender, it stands exactly where 
 the legal-tender paper stands. It is the sovereign will that 
 compels the creditor to take it in payment of a debt that his 
 debtor owes. And beyond that it is like every other thing 
 in this world, a commodity, the value and price of which 
 depend upon the general average of the demand and supply 
 of those things by all the people of the world. Of course, 
 a legal tender of any thing that can be used is safer and 
 
11 
 
 therefore better than a paper money one, which is nothing 
 but a promise. 
 
 WHERE ARE THE DOLLARS OF OUR DADDIES ? 
 
 Another curious thing about this complaint of the passage 
 of the Act of 1873, which stopped the coinage of silver per¬ 
 manently, is this: Down to 1873, in the almost one hundred 
 years of the existence on the statute books of the legal-ten¬ 
 der dollar, there were only 8,033,228 dollar pieces struck at 
 all the mints in the United States. I think it is safe to say 
 that in this great audience there are not twenty people who 
 ever saw one of those coins. Long before 1850 they were 
 so rare that they were being picked up by people who 
 amuse themselves in making collections of old coins. They 
 had practically disappeared from the face of the earth. They 
 had been melted into mere metal again for the same reason 
 that led President Jefferson to make the proclamation sus¬ 
 pending their coinage, because the silver in them was worth 
 more than the legal-tender dollar, the legal tender depending, 
 as I have said, upon the will of the law-making power. So 
 that when the Act of 1873 was passed, silver dollars had 
 already demonetized themselves for a period of more than 
 half a century. They did not exist. The coinage of the 
 silver dollar was not stopped, for it never had been continued, 
 to any extent whatever, for a half century before that, and 
 all the dollars that had been coined had gone into solid 
 silver, like any other bullion, for the use of other countries 
 and our own in the arts. That was the condition of things 
 when the Act of 1873 was passed. 
 
 THAT SECRET LEGISLATION. 
 
 Some people have said that that act was passed secretly ; 
 that the wage-earner, the debtor and the people to whom 
 demagogues address themselves, had been deluded and 
 cheated by the secret passage of that act. I happened to be 
 a member of the Senate at that time, and I am 'able to say, 
 from personal knowledge, as one Senator, that any such 
 statement is absolutely devoid of truth. I do not mean to 
 
12 
 
 say that everybody who makes it knows it to be devoid of 
 truth, for I have lived long enough in the world to give large 
 credit to the sincerity of a great many delusions. (Applause.) 
 It is just possible that, although that bill was in the possession 
 of the Senate Committee for weeks, and, I believe, months, 
 and, although reported from the committee and on the 
 printed calendars of the Senate that were laid upon our 
 desks every day, there may have been some of the sixty or 
 seventy Senators who never saw it at all. 
 
 It is just possible that some Senator might have been in 
 the mountains of dear, old Virginia trout fishing, and study¬ 
 ing nature in forests, streams and the speckled beauties of 
 the brooks, rather than staying in the summer-time in the 
 hot Senate chamber and attending to business by reading the 
 calendar and voting on bills. But I do not think that sort of 
 a Senator ought to go around the country complaining that 
 he never knew of it. 
 
 However, all this is idle. The fact is that the act was in 
 possession of the House of Representatives and debated for 
 a long time, and was then considered and passed in the Sen¬ 
 ate in the usual course. It is, therefore, a gross injustice to 
 that Congress and to the gentlemen of both political parties, 
 for there was no party division about it, to insinuate that the 
 act which recognized that silver in the form of the dollar had 
 long ceased to be a part of the currency of the United States, 
 had been dishonestly or secretly, or by any contrivance or 
 trick, left out from the coinage of the mint. 
 
 ONE CURRENCY FOR ALL. 
 
 There is another thing, ladies and gentlemen, that existed 
 at that time, and that exists yet, and that is, however my 
 political friends of the Democratic party and myself and my 
 political friends of the Republican party may differ in respect 
 to tariff questions, high protection, moderate protection, 
 moderate free trade or ultra free trade, there is one thing that 
 we all agree about, and that is that the universal experience 
 of mankind has proved that, in respect to the money of 
 countries and their financial intercourse, there is always free 
 
13 
 
 trade, that the whole world is one community in respect to 
 the value of its money and its operation between country 
 and country. Therefore, if the United States has the best 
 money in the world, one that represents the steadiest value, 
 
 I say the steadiest value, for that is the thing on which 
 everything depends for labor, for trade, for industry, for 
 speculation, for whatever enters into the activities of man¬ 
 kind, the country that has the most steadfast money is the 
 country that prospers most. 
 
 When the Act of 1873 was passed the principal commer¬ 
 cial countries of Europe had been gradually coming to the 
 condition that Great Britain had long been in, of having a 
 single standard of value, and that was gold. Great Britain 
 established the gold standard not, as certain orators have 
 declared, for the benefit of bankers, bloated bondholders and 
 gold-bugs, as they call them, and to defraud every other 
 portion of mankind, but she adopted the gold standard 
 because her experience had shown that the production of 
 gold was the most steady of any of the metals that can be 
 made use of as a circulating medium. It was like a foot- 
 measure, a yard-stick, or a pound weight in transactions 
 requiring weight. It enabled every man who bought or sold 
 or owed a debt or paid one to know what he was bargaining 
 for and that he was paying precisely what he had promised 
 to pay, no more, no less. 
 
 In the business operations of mankind, whether great 
 or small, I think that, like the water of the ocean and the 
 rain from heaven, the currency that is good for the rich man, 
 whoever he may be, and the gold-bug, is good for the hum¬ 
 blest laborer and the poorest boy that earns his sixpence 
 for selling papers on the street. It is like the air; it can 
 have no classification; no one is better off than another in 
 that respect. 
 
 That was the reason why Great Britain adopted the gold 
 standard. What were the consequences? She gradually 
 became stronger and stronger in the accumulation of general 
 wealth—not wealth so well distributed as ours, on account 
 of her dense population and the enormous land-holdings 
 
and great estates, so that the great body of the 
 people have always found it impossible to become land¬ 
 holders themselves, while here happily it is quite the other 
 way—but she became in her general wealth stronger and 
 stronger until at last she is the great centre and mistress of 
 commercial transactions of the world. The farmers of 
 Minnesota, of Kansas and of California know perfectly well 
 that the price of their wheat is chiefly regulated by the price 
 of wheat in London. 
 
 The cotton raiser of the South knows perfectly well, 
 although United States factories grow more and more, and 
 the South has cotton and water power and labor, and I am 
 glad to see them made use of—the cotton raiser of the South 
 knows perfectly well that the price of his cotton is still really 
 regulated by the price of cotton in England. 
 
 This is not because England is any better than we are, but 
 it is because she has appreciated the value of a steadfast 
 financial policy, and has realized that a dollar should be the 
 same to-day, to-morrow, next week and next year, so that 
 the man who borrows it may know exactly what he has to 
 return, and the man who makes contracts in great transac¬ 
 tions, employing thousands of people, may know exactly in 
 what measure of money he is to pay his obligations and in 
 what he is to be paid his profits. 
 
 It is in great measure this that has made her strong and 
 mistress of the finance and the commerce of the world, just 
 as we shall be in the life-time of some of you who are here 
 listening to me, if we only have the steadfastness and intel¬ 
 ligence that our forefathers had—to have a standard of 
 money that means one thing to everybody, and is the same 
 thing all the time. 
 
 HOW SILVER FELL. 
 
 Silver began to fall in price. The free-coinage men now 
 say that silver has fallen since 1873 because Congress de¬ 
 monetized it, as they call it; that is, does not allow the coin¬ 
 age of it any longer at the mints. They are mistaken about 
 that. The otfrcrai 1 report of the Director of the Mint, where 
 
i5 
 
 statistics for all these years are given in detail, shows that 
 the price of silver had begun to fall long before the passage 
 of that act, and that it did not fall any faster after the pas¬ 
 sage of the act than before. But then came the Act of 1878, 
 when, through a strange delusion, Congress was persuaded 
 —gentlemen of both parties were persuaded—to compromise, 
 as it was called, and to provide that the Treasury should buy 
 from two to four million ounces of silver a month, and then, 
 by a later act, four and a half million ounces a month, and 
 coin it at the mint. And everybody who was in favor of 
 that sort of thing said, “ Why now silver will rise, and the 
 silver dollar of 412^ grains, the standard, 371.25 grains of 
 pure silver, will be worth just as much as the silver dollar of 
 the times of Jefferson and Madison and Washington. That is, 
 it will be equal to one-tenth of a gold eagle, and 15.98 pounds 
 of it will be worth one pound of gold; and, therefore, the 
 double standard is just as good as a single standard.” If 
 this were true it would be so, and you could have two so- 
 called standards. If they were both of the same value, there 
 would be no harm to anybody. But our fathers, as I have 
 said, found that they could not keep them at the same value, 
 and had to rectify the matter twice in the short period of the 
 coinage of the silver dollar. 
 
 Our friends said, in 1878, “ If you go into the market and 
 buy silver, the value of silver will rise, and your silver dollar 
 will become just as good as a gold dollar.” Well, we fool¬ 
 ishly passed the act, and instead of silver rising, it continued 
 to fall, and the more we bought, up to the four and a half 
 million ounces, the faster it fell. 
 
 What does that prove ? It proves what I said before, and 
 venture to repeat, that it is impossible for the will of man, for 
 the will of a whole nation, if we were absolutely unanimous 
 about it, by passing laws, to make a thing worth any more 
 than it is really worth; and what it really is worth depends, 
 as Jefferson said, upon its commercial value in all the markets 
 of* the world. 
 
 As I have said, the Director of the Mint has every year 
 reported about this matter, and any of you who are curious 
 
16 
 
 about it-for it is a store-book of information-can take and 
 read his report for 1893, which gives all the statistics to 
 which I refer during the whole history of this matter, not 
 argument but facts that every banker, and every mechanic, 
 and every wage-earner of every kind, who can read English, 
 can understand just as well as I can. 
 
 The upshot of the silver-purchase business was, that down 
 to 1893, when this report of the Director of the Mint, to 
 which I have referred, was made, the price of silver had run 
 « down to seventy-three cents an ounce. I should like to tres¬ 
 pass upon your patience to read, as illustrating what this 
 present proposed silver-dollar business means, a short letter 
 that I received from Mr. Preston, the Director of the Mint, 
 the other day, to whom I wrote for precise statistics. This 
 is his letter :— 
 
 “ Treasury Department, 
 
 “ Bureau of the Mint, 
 “Washington, D. C., May 14, 1895. 
 
 “ Hon. George F. Edmunds, 
 
 “ No. 1507 Spruce Street, 
 
 “ Philadelphia, Pa. 
 
 “ Sir: — I have to reply to the inquiries contained in your 
 letter of the 13th instant, as follows:— 
 
 « First—The Act of April 2, 1792, provided that the gold 
 coins of the United States should contain 24.75 grains of 
 pure gold and the silver coins 371.25 grains of pure silver 
 to the dollar. The Act of June 28, 1834, reduced the weight 
 of the gold coins so that the amount of pure gold to the 
 dollar was 23.20 grains. The Act of January 18, 1837, 
 changing the fineness, increased the weight of pure gold in 
 the dollar to 23.22 grains, at which it has since remained. 
 No change was made in the quantity of pure silver in the 
 silver dollar and fractional parts thereof until the passage of 
 the Act of February 21, 1853, by which all fractional coins 
 were made subsidiary and the quantity of pure silver in the 
 same reduced to 345.6 grains per dollar. This act also 
 provided that the silver coinage, except the dollar, should be 
 on Government account. The silver dollar still continued to 
 
i; 
 
 be coined for individuals. The Act of February 12, 1873, 
 increased the amount of pure silver in the subsidiary silver 
 coins to 347.22 grains. 
 
 “ Second .—The coinage of the silver dollar and fractional 
 parts thereof was free from 1792 until the passage of the 
 Act of February 21, 1853, which, as before stated, provided 
 that the coinage of the half and quarter dollar, the dime and 
 half dime, should be on Government account. 
 
 “ Third .—The average price of silver during the calendar 
 year 1894 was $0.6348. 
 
 “ Fourth .—At the average price of silver for 1894 the bul¬ 
 lion value of the silver dollar was $0.49097. At this rate the 
 coining value of an ounce of pure silver being $1.2929, the 
 owners of silver bullion would realize a profit on each ounce 
 of $0.6581. 
 
 “ I have sent you by to-day’s mail a copy of the report of 
 the Director of the Mint for the fiscal year 1893, and would 
 call your attention to pages 83 to 94, inclusive. 
 
 “ Respectfully yours, 
 
 “ R. E. Preston, 
 
 “ Director of the Mint." 
 
 You will see from this letter that the average price of silver, 
 •during the calendar year of 1894, was 63.48 cents per ounce. 
 At the average price of silver for 1894, the bullion value 
 •of the silver dollar was 49.097 cents. 
 
 So that the silver dollar at any store where they have them 
 as worth a little less than fifty cents, so far as the metal goes. 
 All the rest is the will of the United States, declaring that if 
 anybody owes you, you are compelled to take it at a dollar. 
 
 Mr. Preston also says that 
 
 “ At this rate the coining value of an ounce of silver being 
 $1.2929, the owners of silver bullion will realize a profit on 
 •each ounce of 65.81 cents.” 
 
 The result of that is, as you will see, that if the last 
 Congress had passed the law which is now so vociferously 
 ■demanded by the free-coinage people, every owner of silver 
 bullion, every producer of it, could take his ounce of silver 
 
i8 
 
 to the mint in Philadelphia, worth 63.48 cents, and get for it 
 $1.2929, and, having got, therefore, his more than two silver 
 dollars for his ounce of silver—more than two dollars for 
 one—he comes to you, workingmen, or to me, lawyer, or 
 whatever, whom he owes, and says: “ There, if I had 
 
 brought you silver metal, it would have taken ten pounds to 
 pay what I owe you, but now I have taken it to a beneficent 
 United States office and have had it stamped, and now you 
 must take five pounds for what I owe you. 
 
 This, ladies and gentlemen, is not argument, it is the cold, 
 hard truth of the existing state of things; and, as I said 
 before, there is no person of common, average intelligence, 
 rich or poor, sick or well, who can fail to understand what 
 that means to him. 
 
 WHY SILVER DOLLARS PASS FOR A DOLLAR. 
 
 Now, somebody will say at once: “ How is it, then, that 
 since the Act of 1878 more than four hundred million of 
 these sham dollars have been coined, and yet everybody has 
 taken them, and they have been just as good as gold?” That 
 is true. How did it happen? It happened because the 
 Government of the United States wisely, for the good of the 
 people, and, I think, with the authority of law—although 
 that is a point sometimes disputed—kept the value for all the 
 purposes of the wage-earner, and of the trader, and of the 
 manufacturer, and of the railway, and of the farmer, up to 
 the standard of gold, by exchanging it for gold whenever 
 anybody brought it to the Treasury for that purpose. And 
 that is what has compelled this administration, so wisely and 
 bravely as it has done, to borrow money in order to keep up 
 the credit of this debased silver, and in order to be able to 
 exchange gold for it whenever it was demanded, because this 
 administration knew, as all intelligent people know, that the 
 moment any Treasurer of the United States being presented 
 with a hundred silver dollars, and being asked to give ten 
 eagles for it, refused, gold would go to a premium of from 
 twenty to thirty and forty per cent, in less than three days, 
 and every business enterprise in the United States be thrown 
 
19 
 
 into the utmost disaster. We ail know how it has kept at 
 par with gold, and this is just how it happens that all the 
 paper money of the United States, National bank notes, 
 legal tenders, silver certificates and all, are now just as good 
 as gold and will be only so long as we are able to pay gold 
 for them as we do. The moment we stop that, we fall into 
 the attitude that Mexico, Russia, Austria and Italy occupy, 
 having a debased and depreciated currency, either of paper 
 or of coin. It does not make any difference whether depre¬ 
 ciated money is paper or coin. The moment we get be¬ 
 yond the ordinary and commercial value of the metal in the 
 coin (of course, paper has not that), all the rest, as I have 
 said before, depends upon credit. If anybody in the United 
 States, of whatever party or whatever views, wishes to put 
 the people of the United States in the category of those 
 countries and subject to all evils that they are suffering year 
 in and year out, I am sorry for that man. (Applause.) 
 
 AMOUNT OF MONEY PER CAPITA. 
 
 It is said by our silver friends that there is not money 
 enough to do the business of the country, and that if money 
 were more plentiful business would thrive, and wages would 
 be higher. Well, how plentiful is money in this country? 
 Speaking for myself, I should say that it is not very plentiful. 
 (Laughter and applause.) According to the last official 
 report there is of gold in this country $661,000,000, of 
 silver $624,000,000 (which includes half dollars, quarters 
 and ten-cent pieces), and of paper $64g,ooo,ooq, making 
 $1,754,000,000 of currency, which is kept up to the par of 
 gold by the fact that the Government makes it as good as 
 gold whenever anybody calls for it. This gives for every 
 person in the United States $26.02. 
 
 How does that compare with the average of other coun¬ 
 tries that are industrious and prosperous, some of them, and 
 some of them not so industrious and prosperous? In 
 Great Britain the average is $20.44. In France it is $36.31, 
 more than ours, for the reason that just about a century ago 
 France had the awful experience that our silver friends are 
 
20 
 
 trying to bring us into, of injuring themselves to the last 
 degree by issuing paper money on good real-estate security. 
 The land was good enough, but you cannot pay a promis¬ 
 sory note with land. When a man wants cash, you cannot 
 offer him a tree or a piece of ground. Ever since that time 
 the people of France have been the most frugal, the most 
 industrious, and the most economical of any equal number 
 of people on the globe. They have, therefore, more coin, 
 and there is in circulation, or hoarded up by the citizens of 
 our sister republic, a larger amount of money per capita, 
 according to population, than in any other country in the 
 world. In Germany, an industrious nation, the average is 
 $18.56. In Belgium, $26.70, more than with us, but less 
 than in France. In Austria it is only $9.50. She is one 
 of the countries that have been trying silver and depreciated 
 paper. You can have all of it you want. You can get 
 bank notes by the bucketful in Austria, and that is what 
 our silver friends consider an advantage to a country. In 
 the Netherlands the average is $24.36. That is an indus¬ 
 trious, money-saving country, and that is not as much as 
 we have. Australia, that rising and flourishing, gold-pro¬ 
 ducing country, has $26.05, almost the same as we have in 
 this country. 
 
 Thus you will see, my friends, that with this large amount 
 of money per capita, money can be borrowed on good secur¬ 
 ity at a less rate of interest than at almost any other period 
 in the whole existence of this nation. Money, therefore, 
 must be plenty when it can be hired cheaply, just as any 
 other commodity must be plenty when it can be bought 
 cheaply. 
 
 When a commodity is scarce the value goes up, as every¬ 
 body understands. That is a proposition too simple to dwell 
 upon. There is another thing about this country, in respect 
 of the amount of money necessary to do its business, which 
 we sometimes forget, and that is our banking system, which 
 exists in every State and Territory, and which, since the 
 National banks were established in the time of the war, has 
 been so good that no single bill-holder, as in the old State 
 
21 
 
 bank times, has had his bills depreciated by a penny, and no 
 single bill has ever failed to be redeemed. This has been the 
 wonder of the world, for it is almost unique. In addition to 
 that the mail and telegraph facilities make the fact now pos¬ 
 sible that a single dollar will do more business among men 
 to-day than $25 would fifty years ago. So that, when you 
 put all these things together, the amount of money necessary 
 to do the largest amount of business that this country is 
 capable of—and that is almost illimitable—is infinitely smaller 
 than it was before the times of banks, of railways, of tele¬ 
 graphs and of our excellent postal system. 
 
 THE NATION’S CREDITORS. 
 
 There is another thing which, perhaps, ought to be taken 
 into consideration about this business, and it is this: I have 
 spoken of banks and trust companies and other financial 
 institutions. It is the cry of these same silver men, for whose 
 opinions, when they are sincere, I have the greatest respect— 
 (I only hope they will study the matter a little more)—the 
 cry of these people is : “ Give the people the money. Why 
 are these banks and great trust companies standing up for 
 gold as against silver ?” Now, who compose these banks in 
 this country ? Who compose these trust companies ? Who 
 own your railroads, Mr. Chairman ? Who are their owners ? 
 You turn to the statistics, and you will find that in everyone 
 of these banks and trust companies and deposit companies 
 and railways and manufacturing institutions, the vast majority 
 of the stockholders are the wage-earners and day laborers, 
 who have saved from their daily wages what little they could, 
 and have invested it in railway stock or in National bank 
 stock, buying a share for #50 or deposited it in the savings 
 banks and trust companies, where the money is loaned out 
 to other business transactions; so that, instead of these cor¬ 
 porations being tyrants and gold-bugs and destroyers of 
 human prosperity, as they are called, they are owned by and 
 represent the bone and sinew and industry and thrift and 
 economy of the great body of the people of this country. 
 
 Whose is this money ? 
 
22 
 
 The deposits in National banks are $1,647,017,129 
 
 Number of depositors. I > 9 2 9 » 34 ° 
 
 Deposits in State and private 
 
 banks, etc.$1,225452,821 
 
 Number of depositors. 1 >436,638 
 
 Deposits in saving banks.$! >747>96! >280 
 
 Number of depositors. 4 ,777,687 
 
 Total deposits. $4,620,431,230 
 
 Total depositors. 8,143,665 
 
 It is safe to say that of these millions of depositors at 
 least 90 per cent, in number are those who compose the 
 working force of the nation’s industry; and the same is true 
 in respect of the shareholders in railways and almost all 
 other business enterprises. 
 
 Now, do our silver friends mean to turn around and get 
 their two dollars for one at the mints debased to fifty cents 
 on the dollar, and to pay these laborers and savings banks 
 and small stockholders in the railways the money that they 
 have loaned them to improve Western lands, and to build 
 Western railways, and to carry on enterprises, to pay them 
 back one-half of their hard-earned savings, and get rid of 
 it by saying: “ Oh ! it’s a bank, it is a railroad, it is a savings 
 institution. Never mind them.” You are striking at the 
 body of the poor, and the saving, and of the frugal, and he 
 wbo strikes at them is, whether he knows it or not, an enemy 
 of his country. 
 
 Human experience has proved that, without exception, 
 disturbances of business and currency affect people of small 
 means, whether farmers, tradesmen, artisans or wage-earners, 
 more heavily than any other part of the community; and it 
 is they, and not the people, who are called capitalists, etc., 
 who bear the larger part of such evils. The many of you 
 in this audience who are wage-earners know perfectly well 
 that in all such disturbances wages are the first to be reduced, 
 or stopped entirely for want of employment, and when better 
 times come they are usually the last to get the benefit of 
 them. Every intelligent voter of this country should bear 
 
23 
 
 all this in mind, and should try to be sure that the man he 
 assists to elect to office understands it as he does—no matter 
 to what party he belongs, or by what political name he calls 
 himself. 
 
 PREAMBLE AND RESOLUTION OFFERED BY 
 C. STUART PATTERSON. 
 
 At the same meeting, Mr. C. Stuart Patterson moved the 
 adoption of the following preamble and resolution, which 
 were adopted unanimously:— 
 
 The question for the determination of the country at this 
 time is not that of bimetallism under international agreement, 
 but it is that of silver monometallism to be brought about by 
 the independent action of the United States. The free coin¬ 
 age of silver is as unnecessary in policy as it is unsound in 
 principle. It is not needed to relieve a contraction of the 
 currency, for there is now very nearly as much money per 
 capita in circulation in this country as there ever before has 
 been, even in periods of the greatest prosperity. The free 
 coinage of silver is not needed to gratify a popular desire for 
 the use of silver as currency, for there never has been any 
 real popular demand for silver dollars. In all the eighty 
 years preceding the passage of the Bland Act of 1878, it 
 was found necessary to coin but little more than eight mil¬ 
 lions of dollars. Of the hundreds of millions of dollars 
 coined since the passage of that act, it has never been pos¬ 
 sible, even with the inducement of free transportation from 
 the Government offices, to force into circulation more than 
 sixty-seven millions of dollars at any one time. There are 
 now in the vaults of the Treasury more than sixteen and one- 
 half millions of subsidiary silver coin, and nearly three 
 hundred and seventy millions of silver dollars. 
 
 If all the silver dollars in the Treasury were now to be 
 destroyed, the free coinage of silver would not be needed as a 
 means of supplying their loss, for the people of the United 
 States are the unfortunate owners of silver bullion stored in 
 
24 
 
 the Treasury and sufficient in quantity to coin more than one 
 hundred and seventy-eight millions of silver dollars of the 
 present standard. That bullion cost more than one hundred 
 and twenty-four millions of dollars, and its value at the 
 market price to-day is but two-thirds of that cost. In the 
 face of these facts, and in the face of the further fact that the 
 market ratio of silver, as compared with gold, is more than 
 thirty to one, it is now proposed to admit silver to free and 
 unlimited coinage at the arbitrary ratio of sixteen to one. 
 The adoption of such a policy will not only result in vast 
 inflation, but it will also be a debasement of the National 
 currency, which must degrade this country to the level of the 
 silver-standard countries. Gold, which is, under existing 
 conditions, and in the absence of any international agreement 
 the only metal of international currency, will be driven out of 
 circulation. The prices of the products of agriculture and of 
 manufactures will be measured by a depreciated currency of 
 diminished purchasing power, and the wages of labor will be 
 paid upon a scale small in proportion to the increased cost of 
 all that the laborer has to buy. Public and private confidence 
 will be destroyed, and the country and all its citizens will 
 again be called upon to suffer the evils which always have 
 followed, and always will follow, upon an undue inflation of 
 the circulating medium. 
 
 The intelligence and the sound sense of the American peo¬ 
 ple must be aroused, for, when aroused, they can be relied upon 
 to take such action as will avert the threatened calamity. 
 
 Therefore , Resolved , That a Sound Money League be 
 organized in the city of Philadelphia for the purpose of assist¬ 
 ing in the development of an intelligent public opinion upon 
 the question of the currency, and that all citizens be invited 
 to become members of the League upon the basis of the prin¬ 
 ciples herein set forth.