People's Pilot, Volume 2, Number 42, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 April 1893 — A SIXTY-EIGHT CENT DOLLAR. [ARTICLE]

A SIXTY-EIGHT CENT DOLLAR.

There I, NoSnch Thin* *a a Natural Cent or Dollar By Which to Meas are the Value of Any Other Dollar. In the course of a letter upon the silner question, addressed to L A Na 5395 K. of L., Keokuk, la,, State Master Workman J. R. Sovereign says: “The effort to suspend the coinage of silver is prompted by a desire to limit the debt-paying money of the world to the metal that is most easily controlled by the money lender* It is a scheme to increase and perpetuate incomes founded on debt It is a scheme designed to force more bonds and mortgages upon the people. It is more. It is a conspiracy designed to appreciate debt and depreciate labor and commodities by forcing the payment of existing debts in a dearer money than existed at the time the debt was contracted; and to conceal the real intentions of the conspirators and give their cunningly devised scheme the outward appearance of exalted honesty, the claim is made that the silver dollar of 412 X grains is a dishonest dollar; that it is only a sixty-eight cent dollar; that it has been padded out with thirty-two cents’ worth of fiat, and that the poor man is entitled to just as good a dollar as the rich man’s dollar.

“Let no workingman be deceived by such absurd propositions. It is not the silver dollar that has been padded with thirty-two cents’ worth of fiat; it is the gold dollar that has beefi over-padded with thirty-two cents’ worth of discriminating legislation in the form of free and unlimited coinage and a onesided public policy that has discriminated against silver in the payment of government obligations, for the payment of which silver has always been a legal tender. The padding has all been on the gold side in the interest of coupon-clippers. The silver dollar pays just us much rent and taxes, and buys just as much food and clothing for the poor man us the best gold dollur thut wus ever coined. It is a full hundred-cent dollar in all the multifariousexchanges that administer to the wants and comforts of human life; and all this cry of dishonesty comes from the club rooms of associated Shylocks who have conspired to make it a sixtyeight cent dollar at the counter of the interest-taker. The whole scheme is a villainous plot intended to change th* standard of values in the interest of th* creditor classes and force from the industrial masses 32 per cent more labor in the liquidation of debts. “Every dollar issued by the United States is a hundred-cent dollar. It would bo as sensible to talk about a three-quart gallon as to speak of a dollar containing less than one hundred cents. A dollar is a unit used in computing actual value and is established by law, and not by the quantity or quality of its material composition. If it is necessary to put a dollar’s worth of intrinsic value into the material out of which the dollar is made, it then holds true that every gold dollar now in use is less than a thlrty-five-cent dollar, for the reason that reliable statistics prove that the average cost of producing a dollar’s worth of gold in thia country is less than thirty-five cents; and therefore the argument so often made that twentyfive and eight-tenths grains of gold is a dollar because it cost a dollar’s worth of labor to produce it, fall* to the ground. In fact the whole theory that every coined dollar should contain a dollar’s worth of metal is absurd, for the reason that there, is no way of determining whether a dollar contain* a dollar's worth of metal except to measure its actual value by the legal value of itself, or by some other kind of a dollar whose value is established and regulated by a law of congress, and not by its real worth as a commodity. If God in creating the first man, Adam, had said, “Let us put a man’* worth of clay into a man,” Adam would never have been created for th* want of a measure with which to de-, termine a man’s worth of clay. Yet a proposition of that kind would have been no more unreasonable or ridiculous than is the proposition to put a dollar’s worth of silver or other metal in a dollar. Weights and measures cannot weigh and measure themselves, because they are the product of law. Their accuracy . can be determined only by the law creating them. Eleven inches cannot constitute a foot; not because any material thing forbids it, but because the law forbids . it The inch bad its origin far back in the ago of ignorance and superstition, and was determined by the length of twelve grains of barley placed end to end lengthwise. But who in this age of enlightment would be willing to make himself so ridiculous as to assume that the ever fluctuating length of twelve grains of barley should determine the length of our unit of distance? Yet such an assumption could be no more irrational than the claim that we should ignore law and return to the ’ barbarous customs of the feudal ages in fixing the quantity of silver that should constitute a dollar, or declare a lawful dollar dishonest because its value was not determined by an exploded theory of an idolatrous people. “The relative value of money made from different kinds of material can only be influenced by the legal advantages one kind may have over another. If the law of the nation authorizes the free and unlimited coinage of one kind of metal into money and restricts the coinage of another and demonetizes the restricted coin in the payment of certain obligations, its value will depreciate and the value of the metal admitted to unlimited coinage and made, when so coined, a full legal tender for all debts, if produced in unlimited quantities, will appreciate in value because of its legal powers and privileges over the other. Herein lies the inconsistency of the advocates of a single gold standard. They are unwilling to restore silver to its equal legal powers and privileges with gold and adjust the ratio at which the two metals shall be coined afterwards.” ** —We are standing on the verge of the greatest and grandest civilization the world has ever seen. In the language of the farmer heading off a pig—-let ’er come; we are ready for it—Road.