People's Pilot, Volume 3, Number 43, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 April 1894 — TELLER ON SILVER. [ARTICLE]

TELLER ON SILVER.

False Promise* That Have Disappeared— England Laughing at Our Calamity. Pending debate on the Bland seigniorage bill in the senate Senator Teller, of Colorado, spoke in advocacy of free coinage in part as follows: “We were told when the Sherman repeal bill was before the senate: ‘Just let this go; let silver fall, and when silver falls and things get bad, then everybody will come to your relief. Great Britain will be there and we will be there, and we will all do the best we can. We will put things in such a condition that your later state will be very much better than your first.’ We have got to the condition in which they wanted us to get. We have got where silver cannot longer be mined with profit in one mine in one hundred, where every intelligent mining man knows now that he is standing in front and close by the complete extinction of silver mining on this continent I predict here that in six months from this time, if silver continues to fall, and I believe it will, not a silver mine on the American continent will be worked and I predict then that when Great Britain is appealed to she will not come to our relief.” To the remark of Senator Peffer that England would laugh at our calamity Senator Teller replied:

“As the senator from Kansas says, she will laugh at our calamity. She prefers to buy wheat at 70 cents in Liverpool rather than to pay $1.40. She prefers that her dollars shall bring great amounts of our produce and not a little; and she is not coming to our relief, and those who believe she will know little of English character and English greed. We have reached the condition where we may now determine for ourselves what we are to do. We have practically abandoned silver as money. We have it in circulation, but we insist upon treating it as subordinate to gold and putting all prices upon the gold standard and the gold standard alone. I have heard for fifteen years in this chamber that if we would only let silver get low enough we would have all the world' back of the silver question. It seems to me when silver struck 58 cents it had got low enough, yet Ido not hear of any rush of anybody to our relief, neither at home nor abroad. “All the promises of future silver legislation that were held up to us when the Sherman repealing bill was before this bodz have disappeared. They have not materialized, and they will not. There will be for a long time to come, as there are now, distress, want and crime, the result of this legislation. No tariff legislation that you can enact will save us from the baleful blight that you put upon the country by the monetary system now in force. No tariff that has been enacted if left in force will save the country from the baleful blight and curse that was put upon us by that legislation, and put upon the country in the interest of a few men only; put upon the country in the interest of a small percentage of the men, and they the least worthy of all men, because they are not the producers of wealth; they are the men who through inheritance or fortunate operations have become the possessors of money and the representatives of money in this country. That has been the interest that has dominated and controlled the financial legislation of this country for many years.”