People's Pilot, Volume 5, Number 34, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 February 1896 — THE BOND AND THE DOLLAR. [ARTICLE]

THE BOND AND THE DOLLAR.

BY JOHN CLARK RIDPATH, LL. D.

P art 111. The Monster Reigns. From the Arena, March number. « By the year 1890 the people of the United States rightly reckoned that the time had come to end the discrimination against silver money. By the same date Shylock concluded that a favorable crisis had arrived for-him to get undone in toto the legislation of 1878. He succeeded in the interim, by means of the' discrimination against silver as primary money, and by availing himself of the results of the stoppage of free coinage in the Latin Union, in raising the price of gold about thirty per cent. This fact taken the other way gave opportunity to Shylock to deplore the

existence of a seventy-cent dollar. He was grieved beyond measure at the dishonesty of such a dollar—noton his own account, but for the credit of his country! Thepurchasing power of raw silver had not, according to the average prices of the other great commodities of the world’s market, declined at all in the twelve intervening years; but the fund-holding interests had contrived a condition of values and prices that enabled them, by jugglery and falsehood, to denounce the silver dollar as a depreciated aud dishonest coin, and thus to force a disparity in the bullion values of the two metals. The people and their representatives, however, smiled at the ravings of the Goldites, and went forward to complete the legislation of 1878. At this time, namely in 1890, there was a firm majority in both houses of Congress in favor of the free coinage of silver. The nation as such was in favor of that measure. The administration was against it. The question was introduced into Congress in several forms. Motions and bills were multiplied. At lenght on the seventeenth of June, 1890, the Senate, which body has never appeared to a better advantage in our history, boldly took the initiative, without giving the enemy a chance to adopt his usual tac ics, and suddenly prepared and passed an Act for the absolute restoration of silver to its old-time constitutional place in the currency system of the United States.

The Senate at this date .was strongly Republican, and the majority in favor of the Free-Coin-age Bill was seventeen. In the House of Representatives there was an unequivocal majority in favor of the measure; hut before this majority could declare itself and force upon the President the (to him) dangerous alternative of either accepting the will of the, country or of obeying the behest of the money power with a veto, the bill was arrested by the Speaker, Thomas B. Reed, and then under the dictation of the administration and Senator John Sherman a new bill was prepared, which on the whole was the mostmonstruous contrivance that has ever thus far been injected into the monetary legislation of the country.

This measure, conceived in intrigue and stigmatized by its own inventors from the day of its inception, was insinuated into the House in place of the Free-Coinage Bill of the Senate, and was forced upon that body, whose members could not bear the whip of party and the loss of patronage. The Act thus adopted by the House was taken back to the Senate, and that body was thrown upon its haunches by the same power tjaat had prevailed in the House. The majority of seventeen yielded, and the Sherman Law, so-called, became a fact with the signature of the president. It was the most misbegotten and ill-born measure that ever saw the light. It should have been designated the Bastard Bill; for it was disowned from birth by its father! It pretended to* be a bill in the interest of silver money and for the preservation of bimetallism in the United States. On the contrary, it was a cunningly devised expedient of the Goldites, by which they gained in the contest with the majority ten times more ha n they lost.

*Not withstanding the fact that the Sherman Law was an anti-silver law, the first effect of it—energised by the popular misapprehension on the subject—was a marked decline in the premium on gold. This was shown in a corresponding rise in the bullion price of silver. The silver rate was advanced from day to day according to the London quotations through a period of eight or ten weeks. Then the a Ivance was checked. The quotations stood for a brief period at the crest; and then began that steady and long-continued decline which reached the depths in 1893-94, when the price of silver bullion was marked at less than fifty cents to the gold dollar. This phenomenon was caused in large part by the shrewd action of Great Baitain. 'That power was alarmed at the results which seemed to follow the Sherman Law. For many years Great Britain had been purchasing American and Mexican silver at the rate of about fifty millions annually. These purchases she made at bullion rates; and the bullion she coined and sent out at coin rates to her more than three hundred millions of East Indian subjects. It was a harvest bountiful and easy. The United States and Mexico paid the reapers, and Great Britain gathered the sheaves. Seeing the advance in the price of silver in the latter part of 1890, Great Britain boldly and unscrupulously during the remainder of that year and the first half of 1891 cut down her purchases of American silver by fully ten millions of ounces, with a vie w|to glutting the market, reducing the price, and influencing American legislation. She succeeded on all three points! That she nearly ruined her industries in India and brought millions of her subjects to beggary was noshing; she was playing for larger stake!

By the Act of 1890, the gold monometallists once more prepared a situation of which they could avail themselves in the future. The law was so framed that when through the abuse of it by tiie secretary of the treasury it should prove a failure—as from the first it was intended by its makers to be—the only thing required on the part of the money power was to raise a clamor .against a single clause of the law and secure the repeal of that clause. By so the whole fabric of th 9 silver legislation of the country, extending at broken intervals from the foundation of the republic to the year 1890, would be dis-

solved like a fiction, and gold monometallism would reign supreme. The United States now entered upon the era of silver purchasing. The metal which the men of the constitutional era had chosen whereby to measure all other values (gold included) was degraded to merchandise. The Sherman Bill provided for the coinage of silver dollars at the discretion of the secretary ot the treasury. It might as well have provided that the directors of the Bank of England should, at their discretion, hold their sittings in Mozambique! It was never intended to coin the purchased silver, but to treat it as merchandise. It was intended to accumulate it, and then to raise an alarm about the accumulation. The law continued in force for three years and four months. During that period the secretary of the treasury purchased monthly four million five hundred thousand ounces of silver, and issued therefor legal-ten-der treasury notes redeemable in either silver or gold at the option of the secretary. In this instance the option was cunningly restored to the payer, with the full knowledge that the payer would use that option in a manner further to depress the relative price of silver bullion and to make gold the dearer coin! This provision of the law was said to be an expedient for preserving the parity of the two metals, but in reality it was an expedient to exaggerate their disparity by enabling the holders of the treasury notes, with the connivance of the secretary, to draw therefor the gold of the treasury, leaving the silver to accumulate.

We need not here enter at length into the beauties of the Sherman Law. The people of the United States now understand it. They now know what it was intended for, and what it has been made to accomplish. They perceive clearly enough—all intelligent men perceive—that the Act of 1890 was but another adroit step in the processes by which silver . was to be ultimately discarded as primary money, and the United States placed in firm monetary league with Great Britain on the single basis of gold. In the short space of three years matters had gone so far that the gold party, then in firm possession of the administration which it had created in 1892 for its own purposes, and triumphant by its power over the House of Representatives, felt sufficiently emboldened to attack the purchasing clause of the Shermrn Law, and by annulling that destroy the whole.

It is scarcely worth while lo recite the story of the contest of 1893. The miserable melee is still fresh in the minds of men. No doubt the Sherman Law ought to have been abrogated. It was not a silver law,, but a law in the interest of gold. Nothing could have been devised more suitable to the ultimate interests of the gold party. That power, now in active control of both the leading political parties, was able to work its will. The repeal of the purchasing clause of the Act of 1890 was affected without conditions, and with the passage of that repeal, on the first of November, 1893 , the legislation against silver, which was begun in silence in 1873 against the interests of honest money in the United States and in favor of substituting a long dollar worth fully a hundred and seventy cents for the dollar of the law and the contract, was boisterously and triumphantly completed. By that Act the will of the people' of the United States was prostrated. The people themselves were gagged and manacled. Both houses of Congress were thrown down, and Juggernaut was pulled over them by the minions of a power having its head-centre in Lombard Street, London.

The conspiracy of the International Gold Trust seems to have triumphed. The indignation of the people against it has been of no avail. That power which became organic as a bondholding class in America just after the close of the Civil War has, by its league with the financial system of Great Britain, succeeded in taampling down truth and justice, in choking the protests of a mighty people, in destroying their industries, in reducing them from proprietors to tenants, in taking away the rewards of labor and enterprise, and in establishing a condition which tends inevitably to the early and permanent institution in the United States of a peasantry subordinated to the will and purpose of their masters. The visible gold in the world amounts to about four hundred and eighty-five cubic feet. The greater part of this, nearly all of it indeed, is owned by private parties. It is controlled finally

* Of the gold supply of the world the Rothschild already owns more than sixteen hundred millions!

by a few men who hate free institutions and who care nothing for the rights of mankind or the interests of civilization. On the basis of these four hundred and eighty-five cubic feet of gold it is proposed to conduct the business of all the world !' It is the most monstruous scheme ever known in history. The public and private debts of the