People's Pilot, Volume 6, Number 12, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 September 1896 — Peoples Party Convention. [ARTICLE]

Peoples Party Convention.

The delegates to the Peoples Party County Convention are called to meet at the Opera House in Rensselaer, Ind., on Saturday, Sept. 26, 1896, for the purpose of nominating a county ticket to be voted for at the election in November. J. A. McFarland, L, Strong, • Chairman, Secretary. Hurrah for the patriotic populists of Arkansas. Texas populists will stand by Bryan and Watson. McKinley stands for free gold, Bryan for free silver and fiee gold. Union of all the silver forces has been effected in nearly all the states. The old fashioned free silver fare of three cents per mile is still in vogue in these one cent gold standard times. Preparations are in progress for the formal notification of both Bryan and Watson of their nomination by the populists, and they will both accept. It is not true that there is any difficulty in keeping silver certificates in circulation. Nearly all the coined silver in the treasury is held for the redemption of certificates and cannot be paid out except in redemption of them.

Taxes are higher now than they were when corn was worth 50c a bushel and everybody had work at good wages; when the mints were open to silver and gold alike and we had enough of government legal tender paper money to do the business of the country. In the cities the wage worker pays as high a rate for gas, electric light, car fare, lodge dues, doctor’s services, attorney fees, pew rent, beer and amusements as he used to when he had plenty of work and three times his present wages. It will not be easy to frighten him with 50 cent twaddle. He is conscious that he can settle any of the above expenses with silver, even if he does eayn three dollars in a day instead one every other day.

This talk about the impossibility of accomplishing big cash transactions in silver is all bosh. A farm laborer or section hand could take his gross earnings for five years in silver dollars and carry it upon his back twentyfive miles a day, and work no harder than he does now in earning it. It would weigh less that five pecks of wheat and we have seen men rush all day long carry ing ten pecks of wheat away from a threshing machine. When a man can carry the gross results of five years hard labor we insist that it is a mighty big business transaction.

Few people understand that the most prosperous period in our history was not under the highest tariff, but under the greatest expansion of our currency, and when we had neither gold or silver money in the country, none in the treasury, and none promised to redeem the paper money, which was the only money in circulation. It is also a fact that the republican party never found it necessary to raise the “war necessity” tariff until after the greenbacks had been largely destroyed and the currency contracted over one half. It is the small volume of money that is stagnating business now and keeping the treasury bankrupt, but the free coinage of silver and substitution of full legal tender treasury notes in sufficient quantity for our present non-legal tender national bank notes, will remedy this, and a revival of business will follow at once.