People's Pilot, Volume 6, Number 23, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 November 1896 — SUPPLY AND DEMAND. [ARTICLE]

SUPPLY AND DEMAND.

lb* law tha Goldbng* Invoke, bat Which, Aided by Intelligence, la Their Bain. It is qneer how the gold standard advocates lay down a proposition and then seek to avoid the conclusions to whioh It points. In seeking to establish the assumption that silver has depreciated because of its increased production they refer their readers to what they call the inexorable "law of supply and demand." They say that the Increased production of silver has caused Its value to decline—its value now and always being its purchasing power. This would account for one end only of the natural law to which they refer. The supply has increased, but what about the abolition of the demand? Is this great natural law a one sided affair? Do its results refer only to supply, or are they concerned also with demand? It is a matter of history that the demand for silver as money of final payment in Europe and the United States was obliterated before there had been any increase in the output of silver bullion. Did the law of supply and demand suspend its operations until after the "supply" had begun to increase? Is it true in theory or fact that the cessation of "demand" has no effect on values? This is the position the gold organs and expounders take. They refer confidently to the law of supply and demand, and yet place themselves in'the attitude of insisting that it is solely a law of snmiv. Rn* if "ncihalf the people who

now eat beef should conclude to eat another kind of meat, would that have any effect on the prioe? The gold standard expounders would no doubt insist that there had been a sudden overproduction in beef. But, silver being a money metal, lta value relates exclusively to its purchasing power. It is oapable of demonstration, and has been demonstrated time and again in these columns by means of official figures, that no gold standard expounder has ever undertaken to eet aside, that the purchasing power of silver has not decreased by so much as half a cent in spite of the dosing of the mints and the increased output of the mines. An ounce of it will buy just as much cotton, wheat, iron, calico and all other staple commodities as it ever would. It is only when we come to buy gold that we find that a tremendous dislocation has occurred. This dislocation is made manifest whether we try to buy gold with silver, or with cotton, or with wheat, or with any staple product of human labor. The inevitable conclusion must be that gold has doubled in value, and that is what has occurred,-the difficulty in perceiving this being entirely due to the foot that a dollar is called 100 cents no matter how largely its purchasing power is increased. Measured by itself, gold appears to have remained stable, while everything else has depreciated. As this depreciation would be an impossibility, we know that gold has doubled in purchasing power, which is all the value that a monev metal can oossess.