Rensselaer Journal, Volume 11, Number 8, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 August 1901 — News and Views [ARTICLE]

News and Views

Production of Cold. Commenting upon the decrease in the world’s output of gold last year as compared with 1899, the Bankers’ Magazine is undoubtedly right in saying that but for the Boer war the gold product probably would have more than maintained itself. It is almost as certainly wrong in saying that "the virtual demonetisation of silver as a standard of value has within the last five years given a great impetus to the discovery of new gold deposits and the development of gold mines.” Gold production may have been stimulated in Colorado and some other parts of the United States by the fall in the value of silver which has been going on for much more than five years, and which cannot have been largely due to demonetization of silver The greatest of recent discoveries of gold—that in South Africa—cannot be regarded as due in any degree to silver legislation, and the output of the Transvaal mines undoubtedly would have been quite as great if no country on earth had legislated in gard to silver since 1870. It is probable enough that the continued great output of gold will again arouse apprehensions of a decided fall in the purchasing power of that metal, such as were expressed by the distinguished Freneh economist Michel Chevalier after the great gold discoveries in California and Australia. We may at least reasonably anticipate a cessation lof the insensate clamor or free coinage of silver and that contradiction of terms known as a "double standard.” So long as the gold stock is increasing at the rate of ?200,000,000 to $260,000,000 a year it wi)l hardly be possible to make political capital by raising an uproar about the impoverishment of debtors by increasing the value of gold. With gold demonstrably falling in value that kind of uproar will not promise good dividends to any adventurer in the world of politics.