People's Pilot, Volume 3, Number 14, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 September 1893 — THE RISE OF GOLD. [ARTICLE]

THE RISE OF GOLD.

Silver the Steadiest as a Measure of Values—Examples. If it be true, as asserted by Senator Vest —and the Herald has cited undisputed statistics to prove that the senator’s assertion is strictly within the truth—that silver has kept on an even level with staple commodities in recent years, whilst gold during the same period has mounted up from 50 to 75 per cent, above its former level, as is clearly proved by the general decline in gold prices throughout the world, that fact ought to be considered of momentous and decisive importance in the settlement of the great question now pending before the congress of the United States, in which not only the people of this country but of all civilized countries are vitally interested. For we assume (and we will not insult the intelligence of our readers by stop-

ping to argue so plain a proposition) that Americans, and irdeed all th® world, desire a steady measure of standard of value. It for example, using the formula of Mr. David A. Wells (see his work Re- | cent Economic Changes, pp 120-123) or | of the eminent economist and statisj tician, Mr. Augustus Sauerbeck, the i same quantity of the staple articles of commerce, which, on an average, cost, in silver or in gold, SIOO,OOO twenty years ago, are worth to-day as measured by silver, SIOO,OOO, or perhaps a little more, why for any sound economic or even sentimental «reason, or for any reason whatsoever, should the American people clamor, as so many of* them do in the Atlantic and New England states, to have the same quantity of the same articles measure only $69,000, or probably much less, which ara all they are worth to-day in gold, because of gold’s great rise in these intervening years? Why should the farmers and producers of this country have foregone or thrown away $31,000 or $36,000 in profits, or in price, if'the profits were not that much on every SIOO,OOO worth of the products of their labor? Why should manufacturers who put into their business or into their plants SIOO,OOO twenty years ago be content to take out now less than $70,000 merely for the sake of using gold as a measure of value? Why should merchants still adhere to the gold standard so tenaciously when, as they look t>ack, they cannot but see that it was solely and purely because of the Bteady rise of that standard that they were compelled to do business on a falling market year after year? If, then, silver alone (the single silver standard), or silver tied to gold (the double standard), is steadier in its relation to staple commodities than gold alone, and if the double standard is the standard of the constitution, why should congress hesitate for one moment to take such action as will bring us to silver, if that is indeed the steadier of the two metals; or better still, to both silver and gold, tied together by free coinage of both the metals into the double standard as it was established by the constitution ftnd by legislation one hundred years ago. Judging by the continuous dislocation of prices which has been going on under the gold standard since the divorce of the two metals in 1878, with all the bitter experience it has brought, it would seem as though the American people ought by this time to be satisfied that gold alone is anything but a stable measure of value; for by it their products have already shrunk onethird, with the prospect that they will shrink in the near future to one-half of their former value.—Los Angeles Herald. ,