People's Pilot, Volume 2, Number 38, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 March 1893 — What is This? [ARTICLE]

What is This?

The journals in the employ of the goldites constantly point to the decline in the bullion price of silver as evidence of its unfitness as money. When the question is pressed what effect would a like discrimination against gold have on that metal, we are answered, there is no discrimination against silver and in proof we are told that more than half of the earth’s population use silver. To this we reply, that England, Germany, Austria, the United States and France; in fact all the great commercial nations of the earth discriminate against its full use as money. Yes, it is true that not even one of the great commercial nations of the globe recognizes its full money use. Our own country well illustrates the general unfriendly feeling that has long existed among the nations toward the white metal. In 1873 it was demonetized and remained so till its partial remonetization in 1878. By that act the secretary was authorized to coin not less than two millions per month and not more than four. As an evidence of the unfriendliness of all the secretaries, and they without doubt reflected the feeling of the government, they nearly always coined the minimum and seldom if ever the maximum, during the twelve years that law remained on the statutes. Again, when the Sherman law was enacted, a date was fixed when the secretary might in his discretion cause the coinage of the silver dollar to cease and promptly at that time it did cease. Again, it is an undisputed fact that in the fourteen years that have elapsed since the partial rehabilitation of silver, that not one of our secretaries has paid out one silver dollar on the bonded debt of the nation although over one billion and a half has been paid in principal and iutei’est, while all could have legally been paid in silver. And yet in the face of all these facts men, in the employ of plutocracy, stand up and declare there has been no discrimination against silver as money. One more thought: Silver is no longer treated by the government as money, but as a commodity. Suppose when the Bland-Allison silver act was passed that the

government had (and it had a perfect moral and legal right to do so) coined the full four millions per month, or better if we had had free coinage and paid for it on our national debt; thus placing near a billion and a half of silver dollars in the hands of those old hooked-nosed Jews, does any living man believe that they would have warred on silver as they have? No indeed, they would have moved heaven and earth to have prevented the depreciation of the silver dollar. To-day, with an unlimited supply of silver which our government will not coin and use it proposes to sell bonds for gold to do business with. Such a crime ought to cause a revolution.