People's Pilot, Volume 4, Number 7, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 August 1894 — THE QUESTION OF PARITY. [ARTICLE]

THE QUESTION OF PARITY.

A Problem That Has Been Puzzling the Minds of Many 80-called Economic Writers. The question of “parity,” which teems to be troubling 1 a number of editors who desire to use the term as a screen for gold-buggery, is coming home to the people. Those who seek to confuse the minds of the people in regard to “parity” say that the silver dollars now in circulation—dollars that have been coined at the ratio of 16 to I—are1 —are kept at par with gold because they are redeemable in gold. But those who seek to weaken a great fact and undermine a great principle by such an argument as this, forget that these silver dollars, coined at a ratio of 16 to 1 are not redeemable in gold by law, but only as the result of a treasury policy put in operation in 1891 by Charles Foster, secretary of the treasury, to enable the banks of New York to cart the gold reserve out of the treasury in order to force an issue of bonds. Neither silver dollars nor silver notes were ever redeemed in gold until Charles Foster entered into an agreement with the New York banks. Even John Sherman obeyed the law with regard to silver when he was secretary df the treasury, and carried out the policy of the people embodied in the law. He even strengthened that policy by issuing gold certificates against deposits of silver dollars. In other words, even John Sherman felt it incumbent on him to be honest enough to maintain the vital and necessary function of the silver dollar as debt-paying money—money of final redemption. Right behind this question of “parity” is the question of equity-justice. Parity means equality, and equality can mean nothing more and nothing less than justice and equity. What equity, or justice, or element of “parity” can be found in a policy which doubles the value of all debts and at the same time destroys more than half of the money in which the debtor expects to discharge his obligations? The chief function of money, apart from its employment as a medium of exchange, is in the payment of debts. The real “parity” of money is in the relation it bears to the products of labor, for it is in these products that all debts are finally settled. Money is simply the medium through which these products are exchanged. There is no parity now between gold and the prices of the products of human labor. The farmer who, twenty years ago, could discharge a debt of SIOO with one bale of cotton weighing 500 pounds, now finds that he must haul three bales of cotton to market in order to purchase the SIOO with which to discharge his debt. In other words, he must work three times as long and three times as hard in 1894 than he worked in 1873 in order to pay a debt of SIOO. It needs no argument to show that the parity which should exist between money and debts —between money and prices—has utterly vanished under the single gold standard.

These facts were well known to the men who framed the Chicago platform. If they were honest and patriotic what else could they mean, when insisting so strenuously on the “parity” of the dollar unit of coinage of both metals, but that the debt-paying power of the silver dollar should be restored until it was on an equality with gold in that respect? Knowing and appreciating the losses that the debtor class has sustained since the demometization of silver in 1873, the mep who framed the Chicago platform could have had no other intention when they insisted on the parity of the dollar unit of both metals than to announce that their party pledged itself to restore the debt-paying quality of the dollar unit of coinage of silver to an equality with that of gold. If parity in the platform doesn’t mean that, it means nothing. For the restoration of the debt-paying power of the silver dollar, by the reopening of the mints to the white metal imparts to every dollar coined the potential quality of full legal tender. If the maintenance of “parity” between the two metals does not mean that, it means nothing. The silver dollars that have been coined since 1878 do not possess the full legal tender power that is conferred on gold,but, in spite of that fact, they have circulated at par. and still circulate at a parity with gold, although the policy of the treasury tends, and was intended by Foster, to depreciate them.— Atlanta Constitution.