People's Pilot, Volume 5, Number 37, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 March 1896 — A SUPREME HUMBUG. [ARTICLE]

A SUPREME HUMBUG.

THAT IS WHAT THE CRY O SOUND MONEY IS. Southern Mercury: The supreme humbug of the age 1b the cry for "sound money.” It is the offspring of infamy—the child of the gold gamblers and usury grabbers. No money can be sound unless the government issuing it is sound. No sound government can issue an unsound currency. Those who now cry “sound money” do not want a currency that is sound.* They want a system of finances that will enable them to grow fat off of a plundered people. The idea of a demand for sound and honest dealing coming up from the Wall street den of thieves is ridiculous. The sound money hypocrites claim that no currency is sound unless the face value of it, at market rates, inheres in the money. To maintain this condition is an ut-> ter impossibility, no matter if the money is composed of gold, because no power on earth can prevent a fluctuation in the price of any metal. Mr. Carlisle’s claim is that governments cannot make money, that it is the province of commerce and trade, and that nothing is money unless the material out of which it is composed possesses a commercial value. Then, it is claimed by the same class of subsidized thinkers that no money is sound unless it is clothed with the power to circulate as such internationally. This calls into question a variety of money that never did exist. One nation may clothe the currency of another nation with monetary funcfions and legal, tender qualities, but <hat result is wholly accomplished by law. Without the law, it would only be a commodity outside of the country issuing it. The money gamblers would have the people believe the falsehood that American gold currency circulates as money to France or England. This is absolutely untrue. American gold currency cannot circulate in England as money because It lacks the fineness of English gold currency. American gold currency is nine-tenths fine, and English gold money is eleven-twelfths fine. Hence, American gold money only circulates in England by weight, absolutely regardless of the money stamp it may bear. Our money is a commodity as soon as it reaches a foreign shore.

Gold and silver currency passes in *this country at its face value because the law is behind it just the same as it is behind the greenbacks, and produces a dollar out of a piece of almoit valueless paper. As a matter of fact nothing is money, no matter of what substance it is composed, without the fiat of the government to back it. The law is absolutely necessary to make money. This is as true as gospel, no matter what bankers or money gamblers may say to the contrary. There is about one-tenth less silver in two half dollars than in a dollar, but two half dollars make a dollar, iSimpy because the law says they shall be a dollar. Twenty nickles are a dollar, yet they contain only about 15 cents worth of metal at the market valuation. The law says twenty nickles shall be equal in debt-paying power to a dollar, and hence they have this power. A careful study of the money "question will show that this claim for “sound money” is a demand of the money gamblers and that there is no consistency or honesty in it. It is only designed to bunco the people.