People's Pilot, Volume 3, Number 52, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 June 1894 — LOOKING BACKWARD. [ARTICLE]

LOOKING BACKWARD.

The Promised Relief from the Repeal of the Sherman Law Not Yet Apparent. While the south, for reasons that we have discussed on various occasions, has held and is still holding its own remarkably well, the business and trade outlook is not as promising as it was before the repeal of the purchasing clause of the Sherman act, remarks the Atlanta Constitution. The panic feeling has disappeared, and a period of severe depression has followed. Prices are lower. Values, except in certain favored localities, have had a further shrinkage. General trade is in a paralyzed condition. All this has come about in spite of the fact that the financial experts promised the people that if the democrats in congress were not permitted to substitute platform legislation for the Sherman law, prosperity would at once take the place of hard times. The farmers were told that they would get better prices for their cotton, and business men were informed that there was to be a great revival as soon as the iniquitous Sherman law was repealed. Well, we are some seven months away from the iniquitous Sherman law, and some seven months deeper in the experiences of the strangulation that has followed the adoption of the single gold standard. During the week just ended all the features of severe depression were made manifest. In the stock market nothing held its own but the stocks that are in a position for the

bulls to manipulate. Railway earnings —an infallible barometer of real business —showed a further falling off. I Cotton went down, and all the conditions go to show that it will go still lower. There is no demand for cotton goods, and, consequently, no demand for staple. Everywhere there is trade contraction, the result of the strangulating process. With all this, money is still flowing to New York and the other trade centers. There are eighty millions of money piled up in the New York banks. The government is not any better off than individuals. Its expenses are greater than its income. This would not be such a serious matter if the treasury were not managed at loose ends—buying gold with the people’s credit, and paying it out at the demand of foreign bankers. ! How long before another bond issue? Not very long if the Wall street prophets know what they are talking about —and they usually do. All this would, of course, be changed by improving commercial and indusI trial conditions. But such conditions must have not only a basis beneath i them, but a motor behind them. Under I the single gold standard we do not perI ceive any sign of a basis nor any symptom of a motor. W T e see nothing but the steadily increasing value of money—gold—as compared with the products of human labor.