People's Pilot, Volume 5, Number 39, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 April 1896 — BIG MEN DEBATE. [ARTICLE]

BIG MEN DEBATE.

Ex-Speaker Crisp and Secretary Smith DI (cum the Silver Question. Augusta, Ga., April I.—The joint debate between Secretary Hoke Smith and ex-Speaker Charles F. Crisp took place at the Grand opera house here Tuesday evening. It was the opening discussion of a series that will be continued throughout the state by the two aspirants for the senatorial seat soon to be made vacant by the retirement of Gen. John B. Gordon, who will not accept reelection. The intensity of popular interest manifested in the grand financial tournament may be judged by the fact that one train over the Georgia road brought in 1,000 people. Mr. Crisp entered into a presentation of the quantitative theory of money, illustrating it by the ratio of the value of cotton to the yield and the value of money to the amount in use. Until 1873 the two metals were linked together and circulated practically at the same value. No man was bold and frank enough to confess the purpose which actuated the demonetization of silver in that year, said he, but the real purpose was to increase the value of that which remained. The speaker maintained that the discrimination against silver, the violation of the contract which requires that coin should be paid out, was violated first by the republican party, and that this party had set the pace for the gold monometallists. He said that in recent bond contracts we had paid $16,000,000 for the privilege of paying them in coin, and yet we insisted on paying them in gold. He made the point that the people did not need the gold for which these bonds were sold, but that Wall street wanted it. He closed with the declaration that within a month the gold monometallists would be anxious to sell more bonds, and asked a return to the conditions existing previous to 1873. Secretary Smith argued that bimetallism, based on a greater value of the metal in one than in the other coin, reduced the country in practice to a monometallic basis, driving out the dearer metal. He pointed out the fluctuations of ratios in the financial history of France as illustrating the impossibility of a fiat to maintain the parity of two metals. In his rejoinder, with which the evening closed, Mr. Crisp said that John Sherman was the leader of what the secretary called the sound money advocates. The secretary had said that the silver scheme was in the interest of the mine-owners. The ex-speaker replied that if free coinage did not increase the value of silver the mineowner could not be benefited; if it did increase it the whole country would be benefited, increasing the standard money of the world.