People's Pilot, Volume 4, Number 16, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 October 1894 — THE RATIO EVERYTHING. [ARTICLE]

THE RATIO EVERYTHING.

The Absurdity of the Claim That Free Coinage Would Put in Circulation a Debased Dollar. The claim of the combination of money lenders who have fastened the single gold standard upon the United States is that if the mints of our country were opened to the free coinage of silver as well as gold the effect would be to put in circulation a debased silver dollar with less purchasing power than the gold dollar. This assumption is disproved both by present and past experience. We now have in circulation about 420,000,000 silver dollars or their equivalent in silver certificates. Despite the decline in silver to less than half its monetary value, measured by gold, our silver circulation is as good as gold for the purposes of exchange or the payment of debts within the United States. Last year silver dollars sold at a premium over gold in the east in the midst of the panic. If parity can be sustained with the present difference between the commercial value of gold and silver and the ratio of 16 to 1, what reason is there to doubt that parity can be upheld with that difference removed or substantially removed? The divergence between the price of the two metals was caused by taking the primary monetary function from silver and giving a monopoly of it to gold. It was the effect of legislation enacted to enable a money-lending class to rob the world. Undo that legislation, place the two metals upon the legal status held by them until 1873, and the disparity between the commercial price of gold and silver and their ratio value will disappear. It will disappear simply by lessening the demand for gold and proportionately •increasing the demand for silver. With its disappearance would come a restoration of values to their normal standard, the release of the strangling grip which avarice now has upon the forces of production and a general revival of business which would open to debtors the possibility of payment and of stopping the prevalent process of absorption under foreclosure proceedings. In the present status of the silver question a declaration in favor of silver that does not distinctly declare for the present ratio differs not a jot, so far as the practical effect is concerned, from a declaration against silver. The ratio is vital and everything. The purpose of the gold trust to permanently dominate the industries of the world and crush the millions to enrich the few can be as effectually accomplished with free coinage and a changed ratio as with silver permanently demonetized. It would be the most effective, because the most secure and most enduring way, to perpetuate the abnormal appreciation of gold and the undervaluation of labor and all it fashions or produces.—Denver News.