People's Pilot, Volume 6, Number 15, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 October 1896 — JOHN CLARK RIDPATH. [ARTICLE]

JOHN CLARK RIDPATH.

Our threat Historian Gives Out Hit Platform m a Candidate For Congress. We want our currency system put back precisely where it was under the statute and constitution for the first 81 years of pur existence as a nation. Our statutoiy bimetallic system of currency was taken from us in 1873 by a process which I do not dare to characterize in fitting terms. Now we propose to have it back again. The restoration of our silver money to the place it held before is the people’s cause, and the people in this contest are going to triumph. They are going to triumph in the open light of day under the clear gleam of light and truth. The silver dollar was from of old the unit of money and account in the Unit-, ed States. That dollar to this hour has never been altered by the fraction of a grain in the quantity of pure metal composing it Every other coin, whether of gold or silver, has been altered time and again, but the silver unit never. The silver dollar was the dollar of the law and the contract. It is to this day the doflar of the law and the contract To the silver unit all the rest, both gold and silver, have been conformed from our first statute of 1792 to that ill starred date when the conspiracy against our old constitutional order first declared itself. The gold eagle of the original statute and of all subsequent statutes was not made to be ten dollars, but to be of the value of ten dollars. The half eagle was not made tq be five dollars, but to be of the value of five dollars. The quarter eagle was of the value of two and a half dollars, land the double eagle was of the value of twenty dollars. Even the gold dollar of 1840, marvelous to relate, was not a dollar, but was made to be of the value of a dollar. The subsidiary coins were all fractions of the dollar, and the dollar was frf silver only. Not a single dictionary or encyclopedia in the English language before the year 1878 ever defined "dollar” in any terms other than of silver. In that year the administrators of the estate of Noah Webster, deceased, cut the plates of our standard lexicon and inserted a new definition that had become necessary in order to throw a penumbra of rationality around the international gold conspiracy. The way to obviate the,further disastrous effects of this Internationa] gold conspiracy is to stop it. We want the system of bimetallism restored in this 'country. Bimetallism means the option of the debtor to pay in either of two statutory coins, according to his own convenience and according to the contract. This option freely granted, the commercial parity of the two money metals will be speedily reached, nor can such parity ever be seriously disturbed again as long as the unimpeded option of the debtor to pay in one metal or the other shall be conceded by law and the terms of the contract. The present commercial disparity of the two mqtals has been produced by the pernicious legislation which began 23 years ago, and which has not yet satisfied itself with the monstrous results that have fiamed therefrom. t What do we propose to accomplish by free coinage? We propose to do just this thing—viz, to break the corner on gold and reduce the exaggerated purchasing power of that metal to its normal standard. Be assured there will be no further talk of a 50 cent dollar when the commercial parity of the two money metals shall be reached. Every well informed person must know that the present disparity of the two unooined metals is but the index of the extent to which gold has been bulled in the markets of the world. It is not an index of the extent to which raw silver has declined in its purchasing power in the markets of the world, for raw silver has not declined in its purchasing power as compared With the average of other commodities i in any civilized market place of the,! whole globe. No man shall say the con- i trary and speak the truth. This great question is hot upon us. It can be kept 1 back no longer. It is a tremendous i

economic question, that ought to be decided in the court of right, reason and of fact My judgment is that the American people, in spite of all opposition, are going to reclaim the right of transacting their business, and in particular of paying their debts according to a standard unit worth 100 cents to the dollar—neither more nor less—and that they will not accept the intolerable programme which declares in fact, if not in words, that they shrill henceforth transact their business, and in particular discharge their debts with a cornered gold dollar worth almost two for one.—John Clark Ridpath.