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

AN ABSURDITY.

Wa Have Prac'.ieally a Gold Standard Without a Gold Currency. To a Washington Star reporter Gen. A. J. Warner, president of the American Bimetallic league,’ recently said: silver men thought, perhaps, that a temporary expansion of credit might follow the repeal of this [the Sherman] law, but even this has not been the case. Prices have continued to go down; every upward movement in stocks in New York has Veen met by sales from London. When the tables of prices for the year have been made up they will doubtless show a greater rise, in the value of gold, and fall in the general range of prices than in any year since the seventies. What is true respecting prices in the United States, is true in all gold standard countries, excepting that prices went down abroad earlier and faster than in the United States, where they -were partly upheld by the addition to our volume of money through the purchase pf silypr and the issue of coin notes, otherwise the same cause has operated in all gold standard countries. Since June the supply of, money from silver mines has been shut off in India and in the United States, thus restricting the supply of standard money for the civilized world to the gold mines, and whether there is an excess of gold for money after the demand for the arts is supplied, and losses of gold stocks made good, and the annual absorption of gold in the far east provided for, is yet uncertain. But at best, the annual supply’ for money from new production, although the production has been somewhat increased during the past year, when spread over the whole world amounts to very little; on the other hand, the closing of the mints of India and the United States to silver and the adoption of a gold standard by AustriaHungary has added more than 300,003,000 of people to those -heretofore competing for gold. Hence the ‘scramble’ for gold is intensified; and as the gold of the world is now largely under the control of a few great banking combinations we have practically a ‘gold standard without a gold currency’,’ and there is no source of supply of money for the people excepting as it is doled out by money syndicates. While the coinage of silver was free the people possessed the source of money supply that could not be controlled. Under present- conditions, therefore, there is no other possible outcome but dearer gold and lower prices.”