People's Pilot, Volume 6, Number 19, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 October 1896 — The Only Honest Dollar. [ARTICLE]

The Only Honest Dollar.

The fight is to restore to its old place the wrongfully-ejected silver unit, viz.: the 371%-grain dollar. The (Chicago) Evening Journal pretends that it is in favor of silver remonetization. But how ? Why, it would bite off from a silver bar ’chunks each worth a dollar — in what? Why, gold! and each dhunk it would call a dollar until gold fluctuated and went higher, and then it would call in all the outstanding pieces, and bite off larger chunks of silver. But this would not be the American dollar at all, and that is just the point in the case. The old Spanish milled dollar of 371% grains was a standard dollar and unit of value in parts of this country from 169 D to 1773, when the Continental congress adopted it as the standard dollar, on which to Borrow money to carry on the revolutionary war. That war debt was incurred in dollars of that exact weight. The revolutionary debt was paid in silver dollars of exactly that weight. The debt of thte second war with Great Britain was incurred and afterwards paid in silver dollars of that exact standard. If anybody had called the money “a 91-cent dollar,” he would probably have been rotten-egged for his slanderous malice. —Chicago Tribune, Feb. 11, 1878.