People's Pilot, Volume 4, Number 38, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 March 1895 — The Great Silver Bugaboo. [ARTICLE]

The Great Silver Bugaboo.

There is a bugaboo abroad in tiie land intended to prejudice the people against giving the same coinage rights to silver as are given to gold. The bugaboo says there is danger of flooding the country with silver; says there is unlimited quantities of it ready to be dumped into the government melting pot; says there is unlimited quantities of it in foreign lands waiting a chance to unloadin' this country; says that free coinage would make money so plentiful that it would have very little value. Candidly friends it is a vicious, malicious, lying bugaboo. There has never been produced to exceed 200 millions of dollars of silver in a year in all the mines of the world, and nearly two thirds of that in the United States. It is known that one-half of the entire product is used in the arts.

It is known that all the accurn ulation of silver of all the thousands of years since man first discovered its usefulness, now only amounts to 15,500 raillions of dollars in coin and bullion. It is known that we. the poo pie of the United States, modmore money to effect our ox change of commodities successfully ; that it would require 1,800 millions more than we now have to equal SSO per capita. It is known that money wears, is lost and disappears, and must he replenished every seventeen years. That is the carefully computed statement of the United States treasury officials. It is then a mathematical impossibility for us to ,even reach a SSO per capita circulation if we depend upon our silver mines. At the present rate of increase in population we could not get enough silver to equal SSO each for the increase alone to say nothing of raising the amount used by our present 70 million of people. But we lack 1,800 million now of having enough, of having hut SSO per capita in circulation, an amount below what the French maintain, and far below what we once had when prosperity, instead of this salacious bugaboo, was abroad in the land.

What is the remedy? Well, surely it is not the prohibition of silver coinage. Give us all the silver and gold that can be dug from all the hills of the earth. If metal must be our only money, then give mining of the money metals all the energy of government encouragement; build government smelters, government roads to.the mines, subsidise the prospector, develope the mines at public cost, set all the idle millions at work, tear down the very mountain backbone of our continent, but at any cost give us a sufficient volume of money, and cease not until the equitable limit has been reached. When the average to each man, moman and child shall reach §SO, then, and not until then, need there be any fear of the terrible silver flood.

One solid week at the opera house, beginning Monday, March lltli, Hascall Comedy Co. in a repertoire of sparkling comedies, supporting the talented actress Dora Mitchell. Ladies ticketed Monday night. Ed Erwin, blacksmith of DeMotte, was in Rensselaer a few days this week the guest of Jas. Welsh. Milton Witham left last Sunday morning for Ravenwood in western Missouri to visit his brother Wilson. He expects to be absent a week.

Miss Mary Timmons is visiting her parents out of town this week,