Bimetallism Considered From The Stand¬ 
 point of National Interests. 
 
 By Gen. A. J. Warner. 
 
 REPRINTED FROM THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICS <OF MAY, 1894, BY THE 
 AMERICAN BIMETALLIC LEAGUE, SUN BUILDING, WASHINGTON, D. C. 
 
 TS IT necessary, or is it wise, viewed from the standpoint of 
 national interests alone, for this country to rest the fate 
 of bimetallism on the decision of other countries, or even to 
 wait to see what other countries will do before acting for 
 ourselves?- The opinion widely prevails that it would be 
 assuming a great burden, if not entering upon a hazardous 
 experiment, for the United States to restore the bimetallic 
 standard without' the concurrence of European nations. 
 Hence, gold monometallists have entrenched themselves be¬ 
 hind international bimetallism as a safe retreat, and many 
 sincere bimetallists have joined them so far as to rest their 
 advocacy of bimetallism on the condition that other leading 
 nations shall join us. They are for bimetallism if other 
 countries are for it, otherwise they are against it. They do 
 not stop to consider whether all countries are affected alike 
 by the single gold standard, or whether all are alike interested 
 in the re-establishment of the bimetallic standard. But 
 whether the interests of Great Britain and the United States 
 are the same or otherwise, international bemetallists seem 
 to agree that thirty million people in England should be 
 
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 permitted to say whether seventy million people in the 
 United States should have bimetallism or nut. This is as 
 unreasonable as it would be to submit our industrial and 
 commercial interests to the determination of Great Britain. 
 Four years after the independence of the United States was 
 acknowledged, John Adams wrote from London to Thomas 
 Jefferson, that while he was ready to treat with England for 
 fair dealing with reference to the trade and commerce of both 
 countries, he was no longer willing to submit our commer¬ 
 cial interests to British domination. Is it not barely possible 
 that the interests* of the two countries differ so widely that 
 it is no safer to submit the financial interests of the United 
 States now to foreign dictation, than it was in 1786 to sub¬ 
 mit our industrial and commercial interest to the determina¬ 
 tion of foreign powers? Indeed, is it not a humiliating fact 
 that for the past twenty years foreign interests have dictated 
 all our financial operations, to their great advantage and 
 our irretrievable loss ? 
 
 How our interests differ, and whether the United States 
 will gain or lose by independently restoring bimetallism, is 
 the object of this discussion. 
 
 In the first phi ,e, there is an immense difference between 
 the standing ground of England and that of the United 
 States. England has an annual income from investments 
 abroad of at least four or five hundred million dollars, while 
 the United States has to pay annually to other countries, 
 mostly to England, from two hundred to two hundred and 
 fifty million dollars, as interest on loans, to say nothing of 
 the carrying trade and other expenditures abroad. The con¬ 
 stant appreciation of gold, therefore, as Gladstone intimated 
 in his speech in Parliament, inures to their gain, and, he 
 might have added, equally to the loss of their debtors. 
 Here is a difference of millions to begin with. The people 
 
3 
 
 of England may suffer, it is true, but England, as a nation 
 having a large income in gold, gains by the appreciation of 
 gold, and will continue to gain till the point is reached where 
 she will lose more by the bankruptcies of her debtors than 
 she gains by the appreciation of gold. When that point has 
 been reached England may join a bimetallic union, but 
 hardly before. 
 
 But viewed in the light of broad statesmanship, who would 
 gain and who would lose if the United States should inde¬ 
 pendently restore free coinage of both gold and silver to the 
 seventy millions of her own people? This is the real question 
 for us 'to consider, and the only question. 
 
 Let us then undertake to weigh the gain or loss, one 
 against the other, and see where the advantage would lie; 
 
 Suppose, then, an act should pass restoring the law as it 
 stood before 1873, under which the right existed for anybody 
 to take gold or silver to the mint and have it coined for his 
 benefit. First, what would be the necessary effect of such 
 an act on silver itself? Of course, immediately upon the 
 passage of such an act, the price of silver bullion the world 
 over would be the mint price, or coinage rate, in the United 
 States, less the cost of bringing the bullion to our mints. 
 Would this necessarily break the parity between gold and 
 silver coins, or put gold to a premium and send it out of the 
 country ? Not at all; and certainly not until silver enough 
 had been coined to take the place of gold, dollar for dollar. 
 Gresham’s law is a law of displacement and the five or six 
 hundred millions of gold supposed to be in this country, so 
 far as it performs in any way the function of money, can 
 only be displaced by an equal volume of silver or other money. 
 Otherwise we would not have our distributive share of the 
 world’s money, and under such conditions prices would fall 
 
4 
 
 and gold would be sent to us to buy commodities, instead of 
 being drawn away. It is, however, admitted that if in time 
 the coinage of silver, on the above conditions, provided us 
 with a supply of money greater than necessary to meet the 
 requirements of an increasing population, or greater than 
 our distributive share of the world’s money, it would tend 
 to displace gold. But whether or not money supply, under 
 free coinage of both gold and silver, would come to us faster 
 than required for the development of a country like the United 
 States, with increasing population and growing wealth, is 
 perhaps a problem of too many elements to answer offhand. 
 One thing, however, may be safely predicted, and that is that 
 it would only be necessary to restrict the creation of inferior 
 forms of currency and credit, to enable the United States 
 alone to do what France was able to do for three quarters of 
 a century. For these and other reasons, many of the ablest 
 bimetallists believe the United States has power enough in 
 the commercial world to alone maintain the parity of the two 
 metals under conditions of free coinage and bi-legal tender. 
 
 But let us assume for the moment that, in time, silver, 
 under free coinage, would fill entirely the channels of trade 
 so as to raise prices above the international level of prices 
 and expel all our gold. Even under these conditions who 
 would gain and who would lose? Let us undertake to weigh 
 gains against losses under these assumed conditions. 
 
 1. In the first place the five or six hundred millions of 
 gold in leaving us would pay as many millions of debt—no 
 small, gain in itself. In this we would be repeating the 
 historical experiment of the Clazomenians, who, finding that 
 it took all they could make to pay interest on the debt they 
 had created during a war, gathered up all the money in the 
 island and with it paid the debt at once, giving at the same 
 .time to each citizen from whom money had been received, for 
 
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 use in their internal trade, token money to the same amount. 
 The people found that they could make just as much with 
 their new kind of money, at the s^me time saving for them¬ 
 selves the money they had previously been obliged to send 
 out of the country as interest- or tribute. What’ they had 
 before paid as interest they s^ved as profits, and their gold 
 gradually came back to them. 
 
 2. If the gold now forming part of the money of the 
 United States were transferred to Europe, it would greatly 
 swell the volume of money in the very countries where we 
 sell most of our surplus products. The result would neces- 
 saril)*be a rise 6f prices in those markets. We would there¬ 
 fore get higher prices for what we sold abroad, and, as gold 
 debts even, in the end, are paid mostly with products, it 
 would take fewer products to pay our debts abroad. To illus¬ 
 trate this, suppose gold went to a premium of twenty per 
 cent., and as the consequence of a larger volume of money, 
 both in the United States and Europe, wheat rose, as it un¬ 
 doubtedly would, to, say, eighty cents a bushed in silver in¬ 
 stead of fifty cents in gold as now; then, in that case, it 
 would take a bushel and a half of wheat to get a dollar and 
 twenty cents in silver, or one dollar in gold. But now, with 
 wheat worth but fifty cents to the farmer, it takes two bushels 
 to equal a dollar in gold. Hence, under tlie new conditions 
 it would take but a bushel and a half to pay a gold debt of 
 a dollar whereas it now takes two bushels. So it would be 
 with cotton and exports generally. It would take less labor, 
 or less of the products of labor, to pay gold debts abroad 
 than under the single gold standard. Nor is this gain over¬ 
 balanced by any counter-gains imaginable. 
 
 3. Such conditions would check imports from, and stimu¬ 
 late exports to, gold standard countries, as is now the case 
 in all silver standard countries. 
 
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 4. Silver is still the money of more than eight hundred 
 millions of the people of the world. The opening of the 
 mints of the United Statej to the unrestricted coinage of sil¬ 
 ver would make New York and San Francisco the clearing 
 houses for all silver using count l ies ; and why should not the 
 UnitedStates trade directly with South America, India, China, 
 and Japan instead of going through the gold channel of 
 British exchange? 
 
 5. More than all other gains put together is the import¬ 
 ance of securing a stable and equitable money standard for 
 our own people in their internal trade—one that shall not be 
 subject to constant appreciation nor to fluctuations with«every 
 change in the money conditions of other countries. It is a 
 thousand times more important to preserve stability and 
 equity in the standard of value by which the daily transac¬ 
 tions of all our people are conducted, debts created and dis¬ 
 charged, than that we should have the same standard that 
 England has. 
 
 There are many and strong reasons why such a country as 
 ours should have a money standard that would not vary with 
 the varying conditions of other countries. The Baring 
 failure, for instance, affected the monetary condition of all 
 Europe and the United States, and, by creating a sudden de¬ 
 mand for gold, affected not only all business transactions but 
 all obligations public and private in every gold standard 
 country; and this will be more and more the case as gold 
 grows scarcer and is gathered more and more in masses where 
 it can be controlled by few men. Will any one contend that 
 such a monetary condition is necessary, or is best for this 
 country? Few of the people of the United States trade 
 directly with the people of other countries. A thousand 
 transactions are entered into by the citizens of the United 
 States with one another, to one between citizens of the United 
 
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 States and citizens of other countries; and it is therefore a 
 thousand times more important that the money standard for 
 all our people should be stable and sure, than that it should 
 conform to a certain rate of exchange with other countries. 
 The rate of exchange, even with gold as the commoh stand¬ 
 ard for Europe and the United States, varies around the par 
 of $4,867 for the pound sterling, from $4,887, the point at 
 which gold leaves us, to $4,838, the point at which gold 
 comes to us. What great difference would it make in our 
 trade with England should the rate of exchange vary around 
 $5.00 for a pound sterling, or any other exchange point? 
 We had no difficulty during the war, and for fifteen years 
 after the war, in carrying on trade without a common gold 
 coin or a common basis of gold, and certainly the difficulties 
 in the way of adjusting exchanges with other countries are 
 insignificant compared with the importance of having for 
 ourselves a stable and certain money standard, and one that 
 is not subject to change at the caprice of other countries, or 
 by changes in the money system of other nations. 
 
 This, however, is the one and only apparent disadvantage 
 to offset the several gains above enumerated which would 
 accrue to the United States through the adoption of the bi¬ 
 metallic standard. The gain would inure to the whole peo¬ 
 ple, while the disadvantage would be felt only by those en¬ 
 gaged in buying and selling abroad. 
 
 Is it not apparent to any one that the advantages outweigh 
 a hundred times the single disadvantage of a possible varia¬ 
 tion in the exchange rates between the United States aud 
 England ? 
 
 Let us then act for ourselves, for‘the seventy million peo¬ 
 ple whose interests are in our keeping, and let other countries 
 go with us or not as they may choose. 
 
 A. J. Warner.