People's Pilot, Volume 3, Number 37, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 March 1894 — GOLD AND TARIFF REFORM. [ARTICLE]

GOLD AND TARIFF REFORM.

Monometallism Will Always Stanrt In the Way of a Tariff for Keveuue Only In a Debtor Country. India's currency troubles arise from the fact that she is compelled to pay in gold an annual interest charge on her foreign debt of about ninety millions a year. But for the necessity of raising ninety millions in gold annually. India would have had no trouble with her currency. How is it with the United States? Very little of our national debt is now held abroad, but the amount of our securities of all kinds so held has been variously estimated at from one to five billions. Let us suppose that $2,500,000,000 of railway, steamboat, telegraph, telephone and other industrial bonds are held abroad. The interest on this sum, even at four per cent, would amount to $100,000,000 annually. If this interest cannot be ’settled by exports of staple products and merchandise it will have to be settled in gold. In 1891-92 there was a small margin in our favor so far as the visible balance of trade was concerned, but the interest charges on American securities held abroad overbalanced this, and the result was that near thirty millions in gold had to be sent abroad to fettle it. The “eminent bankers” and the financial experts declared that the Sherman law was driving the gold out, but the simple truth was that these experts-had failed to add to the sum total of our

imports the interest charges to be paid abroad. Our exports lacked near $30,000,000 of settling this balance, and eo gold had to be shipped to pay it. Now, the question arises, to what extent will the Wilson bill stimulate imports of foreign goods? This is a vital question. The tariff and the currency questions have been supposed to bear small relations to each other, but under the single gold standard they are intimately connected, as will presently be seen if the new tariff law has the effect of stimulating imports If, under the McKinley law, our imports have been so large that it has been necessary to add a supply of gpld to our exports in order to pay the interest on American securities held abroad, what will be the result if the Wilson bill enlarges, as it ought and is intended to do, the volume of our imports? The answer is easy. If we are to hold to the single gold standard, more bonds will be necessary. Gold will bo irresistibly drawn out to settle the adverse balance, and more bonds will be necessary in order, as John Sherman says, to “maintain the parity” of things. This is the outlook, and it is not a hopeful one. The Wilson bill will add to the drain on our gold resources, not because it is wrong, or because it is a bad bill, but because the single gold standard is fatally wrong—because gold monometallism must always stand in the way of a tariff for revenue only in a country that is a debtor to and not a creditor of other nations. —Atlanta Constitution.