Jasper Republican, Volume 2, Number 13, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 December 1875 — The Paper Dollar. [ARTICLE]

The Paper Dollar.

Mb. Armitt Brown, in a speech made at Philadelphia during the recent election canvass in Pennsylvania, gave the following description of a paper dollar: “It has a value, it is true; but not a value depending on itself. It shines with a cold, reflected light,, like the moon. Take away the sun, and the moon is dark; cut off all connection between your paper and gold, and what becomes of it? You cannot do with a paper dollar as you can with one of gold. You cannot break it into pieces and put it together again, and yet have destroyed only that part of its value which represents the labor of making. You cannot take up the fragments of your paper dollar from the ruins of your burnt house and make them into money again. You cannot take it into the four corners of the globe and buy bread with it It cannot be kept through twenty generations and be at the end relatively just as valuable. Can you melt it up with nineteen others and get twenty times as much as you could for one ? or then divide the lump into twenty parts, and, including your labor, get a dollar’s worth for each ? Suppose your Government comes into dishonest hands, can it repudiate gqjd ? Suppose it falls .to pieces, as many governments have done, has your gold dollar become valueless? Your paper dollar is worth eighty cents to-day, instead of nothing, simply because it is * solemn promise of your Government to pay you a gold dollar for it. The difference represents the doubt of the ability to pay.” Yet this is just the kind of dollar with which Gen. Butler, Wendell Phillips and others of the rag-money school propose to enrich the American people and bless all the industries of the land. France in 1796 was blessed with more than 8,000,000,000 of such dollars, in the form of Assignats, and it took a wheelbarrow-load of them to buy a dinner.— N. Y. Independent.