People's Pilot, Volume 3, Number 33, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 February 1894 — THE GREAT CRIME. [ARTICLE]

THE GREAT CRIME.

All the Gold Standard Countries of the World Are on*Yhe Verse of Bankruptcy— Let Silver Be, .Restored. In an exhaustive article in the National “View on the fallacy of the gold standard, and .the injury the demonetization of silver has wrought in his country, Ronald de Fonten. an English writer, concludes by saying: “The forceful phrasing Americans have branded the act of those politicians wliQ engineered the share of the United States in this transformation scene as a crime against humanity; and trbly it has proven to be no less, for the outcome as it stands to-day is that upon the clearest possible evidence that all the gold standard conn- 1 tries of the world, with the aggregate of their productive industries and financial institutions, are in a state of chronic, potential insolvency, dependent from day to day on mutual forbearance. Are all our politicians blind to these so patent facts? Can they be all dead to the recognition of those principles of sound currency and just money upon which all the scientific economists of the world are now unanimous; or are they each individually so enmeshed in one or the other of the myriad cobwebs spun out of phantasmal money that, with a few notable exceptions, they find t emselves perforce sacrificing to Vilitas and the golden calf? Does history teach nothing to those of them who desire to keep our empire together? Is it not one of the most certain facts of the past that the fined bimetallic ratio and the unlimited option of the debtor, instituted by the first and greatest of the Caesars, did more to cement the incongruous atoms of the Roman empire than the force of all her legions? But imperial England has lent herself to support an experiment which is disintegrating the world, and will, unless we look to it in time, eventually transfer the guidance of the destinies of mankind from Europe to either America (that is. if America restores the free bimetallic law to force and life), or the far east, For the hist fifty years, under this delusion, we of Europe—France excepted—have been insanely throwing away the silver half of that which aione, of all earthly possessions, is positive treasure, automatic wealth, the dynamo of industrial energy and economic force. Gathered throughout the centuries; the original ‘matter’ of our money; the means by which European enterprise won all the rest of the world, we now treat silver as if it were something unholy and a pest. Gained at grat cost, we have wantonly cheapened it and have lent ourselves to a conspiracy to proscribe and banish it; we have almost given it away to the Asiatic, and have demonetized it to prevent the possibility of its return. As a consequence, we English, the wealthiest nation on earth, find ourselves so divested of actual cash that a movement outwards of so tiny a fraction of our general - property as three millions of oUr stock of coin is enough, as Mr. Goschen has stated, to cause a commercial panic. To this pass gold monometallism —used' as the rope to tether the balloon of bank, credit currency—has brought us already; how will our rope' stand the strain of the coming scramble for -substance? The obvious,replv of the conventional financier is that England can draw for gold, at sight, throughout creation. But will that pump always suck? The South American well is dry, the Asiatic lake is a desert, the Australian springs are exhausted and the war chests of Europe have strong locks; there is not much loose gold any where. Reformation, not resistance, will be the wiser policy. Bankrupt Australia, overtaxed India and the murmuring Cape call England to repent of this evil while there is yet room to turn in; America invites it and would join hands in the climb-out of this Avernus. At home wrecked agriculture, failing manufactories and unprofitable mining alike cry aloud to our politicians, without distinction of party, to look facts in the face ams remove the cause of all this mischief instead of tinkering upon its effects or jocosely coining phrases about it ‘under the disguise of which crime fails to recognize itself.’ ”