People's Pilot, Volume 6, Number 15, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 October 1896 — His Experience Against Gold. [ARTICLE]

His Experience Against Gold.

I am a business employe and one who would give overtime and all honest means to please my employer and to promote his business interest. My boss is a stanch republican and consequently for the gold standard, but my whole business experience since 1866 is against it, because I never saw such general prosperity since 1873. “M. F. W.” cities in your to-day’s paper what he considers as two lapses of logic of thd free silver advocates. He pretends as a mere juggling with a phrase the assertion that prices will rise as a consequence of free silver and says it can b 0 only apparently but not actually. He is mistaken. There will be no cheap dollars. There will be the very same dollars in weight and fineness as now, only they will have an intrinsic value of 100 cents as they have now only a token value of 100 cents. The only reliable principal of political economy of supply and demand would bring the ancient value of silver back. Silver dropped 25 per cent in value from 1873 to 1890 because there was no more use for all the silver output in the world and the only reliable buyer was India, but sifice 1891, in reply to the warlike McKinley tariff, England has closed the India mints, has bought silver as cheaply as it could and has hammered it down in price. This made a further decline of 30 per cent, so that we had* in 1894 only 45 cents in a silver dollar. England used the decline of silver to cheapen the value of food produce and cotton, without damaging her colony, India, in revenge for the McKinley tariff. By opening mints to free coinage we would create the first important demand for silver since 1873 and the

consequence would be that silver would have to rise and gold, in consequence of less demand, to fall. As the United States is the greatest nation in the world, with 70,000,000 brainy, diligent, enterprising people, we would be able to hold the balance of 16 to 1 against England. Then the other European States are as tired of the single gold standard as we are and it would hot take long before we would see Germany, France and othertjountries allied with the United States in bimetallism. The United States was the first nation to imitate England in the demonetization of silver and can be the first in remonetization. The dollar we will have will be a true American, independent dollar, a dollar promoting American enterprise, American industry and agriculture, a dollar making the American wage-earner a truly independent citizen, a dollar <promoting the re-employment of all the idle help in agriculture, manufacturing and every .busi-

ness enterprise. Chicago, Sept. 26.

F. X. B.