People's Pilot, Volume 2, Number 25, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 December 1892 — Page 4 Advertisements Column 2 [ADVERTISEMENT]

coinage contained 260 grains of pure copper. These coins were made under the law of 1792. In 1857 a new coinage law made a one-cent coin composed of 88 parts copper and 12 parts nickel, to take the place of the pure copper. coins of 1792. These coins were made a legal tender though they were of less weight, and of less commercial value than 'the ones they supplanted. In 1864, another coinage act was pased which gave us a new one-cent and two-cent piece; the cent weighing 48 grains, 95 parts copper and: s'' parts tin or zinc. Now, one hundred of these, our last one-cent pieces, contain 480 grains, while one hundred of our first ones contained 26,000 grains, yet the law made them of the same money value. In 1882 a pound of these metals, which compose this one and twocent pieces, W’as worth twenty cents and a pound of it would make 160 one-cent pieces, worth $1.60. Here we have 20 cents worth of material changed into $1.60 legal tender value and all done by an act of congress. Here is 20 cents worth of intrinsic value and 140 cents worth of “fiat” value. If congress has the power, through the use of the money stamp of the government, to raise the value of a pound of metal this way has it not the power to raise the value of any other- material upon which it chooses to impress the government’s money stamp? If government can make $1.40 out of nothing, can it not, does it not, really make millions out of nothing? Money is a measure of value, a medium of exchange created by law, hence a nsar creature of law. It is not intrinsic value that makes money, it is not for the intrinsic worth of that piece of paper or that lump of metal that we are willing to exchange oui- labor, but it is for the legal value of the “stuff” we call money that we are all willing to work.