People's Pilot, Volume 4, Number 42, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 April 1895 — GOLD, SILVER OR PAPER. [ARTICLE]

GOLD, SILVER OR PAPER.

Money is value created by law.— Ceroushi. A legal-tender function is a better basis far money thin a specie basis. —Benjamin Franklin. Gold and silver, constantly varying in their own value, can never be made a measure of the value of other things. —Adam Smith. The theory of intrinsic for money has been abandoned by the best writers and thinkers. Coin is not a safe basis for money—the ba.-*e is too small. —Encyclopaedia Britannica. A shrinkage in the volume of currency has caused more misery than war, famine, and pestilence, and more injustice than all the other bad laws ever enacted. —United States Monetary Commission. I wish all money of the nation, whether gold, silver, copper, or paper, was issued by the government and based not on the coin or other money, but upon the credit and resources of the country.—Andrew Jackson. I find that gold fluctuated 50 per cent during a single year of the late war, while the greatest fluctuation of the greenbacks in any one year, as measured by the same standard, was only 9y 2 per cent. —The Hon. Amasa Walker.

There is plenty cf evidence to prove that on incontrovertible legal-tender paper, if limited in quantity, can retain its full value, but there is abundance of evidence to prove that gold has undergone extensive changes. From 1809 to 1849 it rose in value 145 per cent. —Prof. Jevons of Owen’s University, England. The entire amount of coin in the country, including that in private hands as well as that in banking institutions, was insufficient to supply the needs of the government for three months had it been poured into the treasury. Foreign credit we had none. —United States Supreme Court Decision, 12 Wallace, page 540. (This was a reference to the war period.) Then, too, I would change the form of these notes so that instead of being technically, or in form, a promise they should have stamped upon them the denomination, as gold and silver have, being to all intents and purposes money and not a promise to pay in something of no greater legal value.—Senator Wright. When it was o"nce understood that gold and silver are not wealth, but only representatives of wealth, and that money is of no value to a nation except to circulate its riches, all the old notions of the supreme importance of the precious metals fell to the ground.— Buckley’s History of Civilization.