People's Pilot, Volume 3, Number 11, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 September 1893 — HELP FROM ENGLAND. [ARTICLE]

HELP FROM ENGLAND.

The Silver Movement In Great Britain Not to Be Sneered At. The silver movement in England is not to be Bneered at as Sir Vernon Hareourt did at Henry Chaplin. Mr. Balfour told him to his face that he was trifling with the vital interests of England. In another article we have shown the operation of the London system, or gold standard, in the production of goods in Mexico, heretofore imported. Mr. Balfour sees this and gives expression to it in the following significant remark: “The existence of this great divergence between' gold and silver does in certain circumstances most unquestionably act as a bounty upon production in certain classes of agriculture and manufactures. ” Or, in other words, England is feeling the loss of orders for goods, made necessary in silver-using countries, because the gold rate makes profits on imports impossible. England is, from the necessity of her position, a practical student of the laws of trade, and so close is the margin that the mere fraction of a penny means in many things prosperity or ruin. And so her manufacturers are finding that the discounts required by gold are destroying the ability of their customers to buy. Gladstone has always been with the money lenders, while Salisbury represents the producing pooulation of England more. Manchester and Sheffield are beginning to feel the effects, and a powerful silver sentiment is developing very rapidly in England. Mr. Balfour states the argument of the bimetallists very clearly in speaking of the action as to India: “The net result is that a man who owns uncoined silver no longer owns what is practically legal tender, he owns a depreciated commodity, and What relation his assets would now bear to his debts is a matter of speculation ” That is just what the crusade against silver means in America —that while a man has a hundred dollars in coin he has that much money, but if he has the same weight in uncoined silver he doesn’t know what he has. And Mr. Balfour states another principle in equally as terse language: “What has always been a most dangerous, if not immoral, condition of things was ’ that the state should not content itself with determining what the legal standard should be, but should itself regulate the supply of that standard. ” And again Mr. Balfour lets light on the situation in this frank statement of the case. Referring to the United

States and the effect of our adopting a gold standard, he says: “They look forward, in the immediate future, to catastrophe, and feel that the ultimate result may be a slow appreciation of the standard of value, which is perhaps the most deadeningand benumbing influence that can: touch the enterprise of a nation. ” One reason for the haste to destroy silver is that a change in the ministry in England may bring bimetallism into power there, and thus be lost forever the prize for which the money ownera and usurers of the world have been working from 1873 to the present.— Kansas City Journal.