People's Pilot, Volume 3, Number 18, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 October 1893 — THE DEMAND FOR SILVER. [ARTICLE]

THE DEMAND FOR SILVER.

Coin It Into Money and the Demand Will Keep It at a Fair Value. The price of any article, of depends upon the demand for it, and the supply. The chief demand for silver, as of gold, is and has been its character as a metal of which money is made. It is not the use that is made of it in the arts that gives it its chief value, but the fact that it is used as money in all nations of the world to a greater or less amount When you destoy it as a money metal you take away the chief demand for it, and, of course, lower its price. Now, supposing, what is hardly supposable, that when we establish free coinage at the ratio of 1« to 1, that all the silver of the world, coined and uncoined, came pouring into the United States, in a very short time all the nations which use subsidiary coin would be out of silver; all the nations which use silver as a full legal tender, and all the people of the world who use silver in the arts apd for industrial purposes, would find themselves in the same condition, and would have to come to the United states for their supply of silver. They could buy it from no man here for less than its coining value; therefore. throughout the world, it would at once become the equal to gold, and it would follow that we would soon have to supply the demand for it in every country. Ho soon as its bullion price began to approach that of gold the latter would come half-way down to meet silver going up, then it would rapidly flow out to supply the coin demand of the world, which would once more become bimetallie, as it was twenty years agou No man possessed of any silver in other countries would sell it for less than the coining price in America, and so England would have to pay for the silver with which she supplies India, the coining price in the United States, and India would be compelled to be supplied with silver, for there is not 1900,000,000 of spare gold in the world to replace India’s silver money. It is said that the production would be so great if there was free coinage and silver was at its normal price per ounce that the world would soon be flooded with it Ido not believe that. There is nothing in the statistics to show that that would be the case. During the period of one hundred years, from 1792 to 1892, the production of gold in the world was 15,088,908,000—the production of silver was 15,104,901,009, a difference of only about 1500,000,000 and that in favor of gold; and we might go further back if the inefficient statistics of the dark ages could be depended upon, and show generally that the production of the two metals would average about the same. For what reason is it held, then, that this ratio of production of the two metals will not continue to the end? Is not nature consistent with herself? If the digging into the earth for four thousand years has shown that there exists in her bosom on the average about fifteen times as much silver by weight us of gold, why should we doubt future development from an accidental departure now and then of either metal from the average proportion of forty centuries? Surely the gold standard men should give a better reason for distrusting nature than some bankers’ “want of confidence.” —Hon. Zebulon Vance (N. C.)„ in U. S. Senate.