Jasper Republican, Volume 2, Number 14, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 December 1875 — The Question of Currency Redemption. [ARTICLE]

The Question of Currency Redemption.

The people of the United States sell their whole surplus product to foreigners, and buy in exchange therefor whatever their spare products will bring. One of their surplus products is gold, of which they export from sixty to eighty million dollars a year. Altogether, their exports of everything amount to nearly $2,000,000 per day, and their imports an equal sum. Money is needed to effect these exchanges, and only one sort of money can do this. The “world’s money,” gold and silver, is the open sesame of foreign trade. One of the grand problems is to turn our paper currency into this world’s money, and so make these exchanges. Most of the articles we buy from abroad are necessaries of life. Others are- fast becoming so in obedience to the rule that the luxuries of one age become the comforts of the next and the necessaries of the next to that. We can never produce everything we consume. No man or community can do this; no nation can do it. There is and must be an eternal demand for the world’s money for purposes of international exchange. We need it as much as any. foreign nation does.. We do not sell our commodities abroad for the depreciated paper currency of Austria or of Italy. We demand coin. So foreigners will not take our National Bank notes or our greenbacks. They must have gold. When a merchant .who deals in imported wares has exhausted his stock and has to refill

his empty shelves, how does he do so ? He takes the paper he has received here, sells it for gold, and uses the latter to buy his new stock. In’ other words, he has the order redeemed in gold at the best rates he can get from the gold-brokers. The redemption is absolutely necessary. All other questions come down to this: Who will redeem ? We naturally look to the maker of paper currency to redeem it. Bank-paper is sent to the bank; Govern-ment-paper should be sent to the Government. But the latter dishonors its promises to pay. It says it will redeem tome time, but not now. Hence brokers step in to fulfill the function of redemption. The' amount of gold they give for a paper dollar fixes the purchasing power of the greenbacks. This is an universal rule. Whenever the maker of a promise to pay refuses or delays to keep his promise, the amount of gold anyone else will give for the written or printed sign of the promise fixes its value. This is true of the currency of Russia, of Austria, of Italy, of America, of the notes of a suspended or doubtful bank, of any and every broken promise to pay. Now, the amount of gold given for any such promise by brokers depends wholly upon what they think the chances of its maker’s ultimately redeeming it in gold are. If all intent of such redemption is formally disclaimed, as the greenbuckers wish it in the case of our currency to be, no broker will redeem the paper at all. How, then, if gold-re-‘dbraption is abandoned, even in theory, is our currency to be exchanged into that of the world, and the absolutely necessary international exchange effected I— Chicago Tribw#,