People's Pilot, Volume 4, Number 10, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 August 1894 — A FALSE POSITION. [ARTICLE]

A FALSE POSITION.

Many Who Dlschah the Silver Question Take Erroneous Grounds. An end should be put to the use of such humbugging phrases as “the parity of the two metals” in the discussion of the silver question. Those who use them advertise their insincerity by refusing to make the experiment of returning to the system under which gold and silver dollars in this country and in France always circulated at par. So long as the mints of France and the United States were open to the free coinage of silver and gold at a fixed ratio, gold and silver coins always circulated at par. The fact that, owing to the mistake of the United States in overvaluing silver, legal-tender silver dollars were exported almost as rapidly as they were coined did not disturb the parity of the coins of the two metals in this country. Although a small premium was offered for silver by brokers, gold was anywhere received by merchants at its face value. In France between 1803 and 1873 silver and gold were indifferently coined at the mints and stocks of the coins of both metals w r ere accumulated. This experience ought to teach people the folly of assuming that under a bimetallic system a country would necessarily be obliged to confine itself to the use of one metal. If a country could not retain a stock of the precious metals with a bimetallic system in force, the fact would be explainable in some other manner, just as our failure to hold gold under the present system will be explained when it is seen that the effect of the general scramble for gold has put the United States, a debtor nation, at a disadvantage and compelled it to surrender its accumulation of the yellow metal.— San Francisco Chronicle.