People's Pilot, Volume 6, Number 19, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 October 1896 — DR. ARENDT TO MR.FREWEN. [ARTICLE]

DR. ARENDT TO MR.FREWEN.

Extract Beartag Upon Labor From a Letter by tbe Former to the Latter. In answer to the query, “Do you think that free coinage will bring the dollar to 50 cents?” Dr. Arendt said: “That is a statement so fantastic, and even wicked, that it must lose McKinley many votes. As a. foot rule is 12 inches, so also is a dollar 100 cents. The terms are identical. What the phrase means quite different. It means that the purchasing power of the silver dollar after free coihage will fall by 50 per cent—in other words, that prices of commodities will double. Of course this is not true either. If tbe rise in silver is to involve any such rise in gold prices, then the converse must also be true—namely, that the fall in silver has brought about the present great fall in gold prices. In other words, that because of the fall in silver we are now using a 200 cent dollar—a dollar which buys twice as much as 20 years ago. But, as far as the workingman is concerned, it is io be remembered that his daily expenses are, to a high degree, constant. It? is only wholesale prices which fluctuate violently. “In tbe wholesale markets prices have fallen increasingly, and in these markets a rise would be the salvation of the producing classes. You will admit,” said Dr. Arendt, “that all history shows the welfare of the working classes does not depend upon the price of bread, but upon the demand for their labor. If prices rise, of course the demand for labor increases. Falling prices are ever followed by a decline of industrial enterprises. "From Russia, for example, the very home of low prices, laborers are now migrating to Germany, where prices are higher. Again, from the eastern provinces in Germany, where the cost of living is extremely low, the human stream flows westward, even though living in western Germany is dearer. The-cost of living in the United States is far higher than in -Italy; still the American workingman does not emigrate to Italy. On the contrary, it is the Italian who emigrates to the United States. There is something unreal and shadowy about this working class argument. Labor gets its tolerably regular percentage of all the wealth produced. “If our wealth is produced in Anierica, then, with free coinage, the working classes will get more of it. And free coinage—which will, of course, raise the price of silver, and thus raise the exchange rates with all Asia—will firmly establish many productive industries, the existence of which in America and their transference to Asia are seriously threatened by the present low price of silver. The especial money of the working classes is silver, and to prevaricate, to snuffle and to frame theories that this money should be kept ‘destandardized, ' as today, in order to protect that class which receives its wages, in silver—such theories are a disgrace to those who continue to employ them in the face of all the facta, ’* The farmer wants free sliver tn orddr that there may be a fair market for his product, so that he may pay his debts according to contract. The workingman wants free silver because that will give tbe producers more money and give him a home market worth having.