People's Pilot, Volume 4, Number 10, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 August 1894 — SILVER AND GOLD MONEY. [ARTICLE]

SILVER AND GOLD MONEY.

The Weakness of the Single Gold Standard Bringing to the Front Many Advocates oi Bimetallism. Now, that the single gold standard has been tried and found wanting, the leading financial periodical's of the country are publishing some very strong pleas for bimetallism. Edward B. Howell, in the July number of Rhodes’ Journal of Banking, has a capital article on “The Malady of the Gold Standard.” Mr. Howell illustrates the usefulness of a double money standard in the following striking paragraph: “Secretary Carlisle is said to have asserted at the banquet of the New York chamber of commerce last fall, that he had never been able to understand what is meant by a double standard of value, and had never seen any one who could tell him. The phrase is not a felicitous one, yet it does not stand for an impossible thing. There is the same advantage in the double standard of value that there is in two legs to a man. The man with two legs has a three-fold advantage over the man with only one, for, first, he can stand on the right to the exclusion of the left; second, he can stand on the left to the exclusion of the right; or, third, he can stand on both legs simultaneously. A nation with a double standard can rely on gold when that is the more abundant metal, as it was prior to 1873, or on silver when that is more abundant, as it has been in recent years, or under favorable circumstances it can use both. The policy of every government should be at all times to freely coin and use the cheaper metal. The other will then never get very far away.” He goes on to say that if during the period of 1878-1892 the United States had dispensed with the use of uncovered paper, including national bank notes, and had coined and put into circulation every ounce of silver and gold produced in this country during those nineteen years, our per capita circulation would not have been more than S 3 greater than it was in 1892. He concludes as follows: “Silver production has hot increased during the same period as rapidly as the production of cereal crops, nor of cotton, nor as rapidly as the increase of foreign commerce. The fifty-cent silver dollar is not due to an over-pro-duction of silver, for if crop production and the growth of commerce is a measure, there has been no over-production of silver. But is is due to the demonetization of silver and the underproduction of gold. “In all the important mining camps of the west, the most profitable and easily worked portion of the larger mines, known as the oxidized zone or ‘gossan,’ has as a rule been worked out. It is not improbable that a zenith of silver production is not far away, and that twenty-five years hence the world will be as clamorous for more silver as it is now for more gold.” Another article on “bimetallism” in the same magazine points out the injury resulting from the reduction of our circulating medium one-half by demonetizing one of the precious l

metals. He gives the case of a udan whose house was worth $2,000 under the bimetallic system. The man borrows 31,000 on his property. Then the currency is contracted one-half by demonetization, and the man finds that it takes his house to satisfy his debt, whereas when he borrowed the monev the house would have sold for enough to pay the debt and stijl leave him 31, * 000. The author holds that if this country would act independently and remonetize silver it would draw to us the trade of 800.000,000 people in the silver-using countries of India, China and Spanish America. He says that if our mints were opened to the unrestricted coinage of silver; “A vast stream of gold, as well as silver, could be made to flow into the United States, a stream swelled by the higher price which cotton, and wheat, and every kind of farm produce would command when exported from the United States to gold-using countries; a flow of specie which would fill the vaults of banks in a manner which would not only benefit the majority of bankers —indeed keeping some of them from failure—but would supply lifeblood to almost every industry in our land. Farmers and miners would then have money to deposit in banks, new railroads would be needed to do the business of a prosperous country, factories which are now being obliged to close their doors because of the widespread poverty of the land owing to bad legislation respecting the precious metals, would be kept busy supplying the needs of men well able to pay for clothing and the necessaries and even luxuries of life for their families. Schools, and libraries, and churches, throughout our land could be maintained; and, in short, civilization in its best form would be saved from being pi'ostrated. “Under the bimetallic coinage system gold money and silver money are one money. If there was never too much specie in the United States for the business done within its borders, if there has never been too much specie in any country in any part of the world under the bimetallic coinage system, there cannot be enough specie to maintain prices of a vast amount of merchandise and to carry on the business of the United States, which yearly amounts to many billions of dollars, when one of the precious metals is stricken down.” It is shown in this article that gold monometallism is a new and a dangerous experiment and our object lesson under it grows sadder every day. bimetallism has stood the test for thousands of years. One Roman emperor tried to make all taxes payable in gold, but no other emperor ever tried the experiment again. The framers' of our constitution forbade any state to make anything but gold and silver legal tender money. The idea never occurred to them that our mints might some day be closed to one of these metals. We are glad to see the benefits of bimetallism presented in our banking journals. It is an indication that the tide is turning against the gold standard. —Atlanta Constitution.