Rensselaer Republican, Volume 27, Number 47, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 July 1896 — IN A NUTSHELL. [ARTICLE]

IN A NUTSHELL.

Simple Facts Concerning Money and ltd and AbiiHen—Timely and Valuable Information Ilealt Out In Small Packages. Money is a thing of value, used to make exchange of other things easy. Money that is not a thing of value is simply the representative of money or credit, for convenience’s sake. Such is paper money, checks, drafts, bills of exchange, postal and money orders. Money has in early ages had the form of cattle. Ponies serve as money among some Indian tribes. It was reserved for civilized people to invent systems of credit money, and ■ then to become confused as to the nature and relation of money and its representative. The first essential of money is value and the second is convenience of form. These are the reasons which make gold and silver the best kind of money. When gold and silver first came to be used os money they were measured by weight. When men learned how to inirease the alloy without detection, fair dealing required the civil power to analyze the gold and silver in circulation and stamp upon the metals the degree of their fineness and the amount of their weight. A purchase is a swap or trade of one kind of value for another. When a i mon gave a horse for a cow of equal value by means of the medium of money

the principles of barter did not change. The swap or trade was only a triangular one. Modern money systems have refined this principle ' and made it complex, but have never changed the principle. Governments do not create money. What they haye they accumulate. Why pay taixes if governments in;- their sovereign power could create money? Taxes and dues of stated sort are the avenues through which our national treasury isfllled. j If nations issue promise s to pay, they must provide something of. value in which to pay. Nations “perish or default, but the right of property endures forever. Paper loses value by default, but gold and silver .do not. Gold has a higher value for money purposes-than silver because it is more compact in weight and presents less surface for loss by wear. For several centuries before the United States government was organized, one pound of gold equaled in value from 14 to something over 16 pounds of giiver. It was in this ratio more desirable in the arts and as money. A change of ratio of 14 to 16, or vice versa, is enough to give one or the other 15 per cent more value. American coins were first molded in the ratio of 15 to 1. There was only .l-10tfa of 1 difference between I’s to 1 and the market ratio, but it was enough to set the cheaper money to work to drive out the dearer. The dearer money in this instance was silver, and it disappeared from circulation. The silver dollar was worth more as bullion than as coin. ( A; There have been periods in American history when gold was the dearer money of the two, but for nearly nine tenths of the time previous to .1879, silver was the dearer money and kept out of circulation. This was on account of a stiff legal or mint ratio, with free and unlimited coinage. "It was impossible to float both metals at once, with full legal tender power. There was therefore no true bimetallism. The Republican party adopted a law providing for specie payment and a policy of freely exchanging gold for silver. It was neccessary in order to accomplish this to limit the number of silver dollars coined, but the purchasing power of the silver “dollar of our daddies” was preserved by retaining the time honored ratio of 1834 at the mints. This floated all the silver possible at a par with gold and gave the country true bimetallism. Herein may be seen the , difference between Republican and Democratic statesmanship. You can tell them by their works. The Republican party never was an enemy to silver nor partial to gold. The free exchange of gold and silver, dollar for dollar, at the mints of the United States is based on a policy and not a law. A law requiring payments in gold instead of coin would make gold the only legsd tender, and establish gold monometallism. The Republican party prevents this by founding the practice of the country upon a policy to exchange gold for silver at the will of the holder, and to pay obligations in coin. As long as the policy of making all coin equal to the best coin prevails, our money of, final redemption includes both silver and gold. Any other policy drives out the more valuable coin, as experience and reason show. This means monometallism, or use of one metal alone as redemption money and brings, oil a contraction of circulating medium equal to the amount driven out. The legal tender quality of our money is given it by the exercise of the sovereign authority of the people through their chosen representatives to make debts payable equally in gold, silver or greenbacks. Good credit of the government is necessary to give effect to the edict of the people. Tl)o legal tender power is not needed to make gold good money, but the legal tender power conferred upon silver in limited- quantities makes silver as good as gold, and gives the people the use Of both metals. There is no other way to secure the use of both metals. *

This country is not on a gold basis. This would mean that all debts must? be paid in gold alone. This country is on a COIN basis with a gold standard, which calls into the fullest possible safe use the silver of the country. Hence the “existing gold standard” mentioned in the St. Louis platform was not the work of “gold bugs’’ but of true bimetallists. There is no getting away from these facts: A paper dollar destroyed is lost for ever. It was not a dollar, but only a promise to pay a dollar, and the promise is no longer in evidence. A silver dollar battered so as not to be able to see the government stamp becomes bullion and is worth what 371.25 grains of bullion is worth, about 53 cents. A gold dollar battered so as not to be able to see tho government stamp also becomes bullion, but there is enough bullion there to exchange it for 100 cents. It’s defacement did not lose it anything of its value. But under the “existing gold standard” these two coins are equally useful for the payment of all debts because the government injects 47 cents worth of credit into silver. As the credit of nations like that of men is lilnited, so it becomes necessary to limit the number of silver dollars that demand so much credit. It is at once the hope, purpose and so far as possible. the pledge of the Republican party that by international agreement of the great powers of tho earth, silver may grow in value t and thus require less of national credit to maintain a par purchasing power with gold, at the 16 to 1. The number of silver dollars added to our coinage may increase as the demand for national credit in them decreases.

Not many Republicans will have such ib radical friendship for silver as to influence them-to line up with Altgeld, Tillman and the Populist breed that are limply the advance agents of communists and anarchy. The Republican party is the only i party that has ever solved the intricate problems of government and brought honor, glory and prosperity to the republic. The Republican party will do business at the old stand after March 4, and again restore confidence to our financial policy and cash to a depleted treasury. The Republican party alone, in emergencies like the present, in 1860, when the Union was assaulted, can meet and master the alarming exigencies. ’ Senator Hill threw the entire dictionary. into his answer to the speeches of Altgeld and Tillman at the Chicago convention of Populists and repudlationists, when he said: “I am a Democrat, but not a revolutionist.” The doctrines of the platform and the sentiments of the speakers sound like the mouthings of Robespierre. The Haymarket riot at Chicago was the death khell of anarchy. The Chicago convention sounded the funeral notes of revolution and free silver repudiation in this land of justice and freedom.

A Democratic Louisville paper has been interviewing workingmen on the political situation and, among others, a life-tong Democrat who is secretary of the Locomotive Engineers’ union. “We work too hard,” he said, “and run too many dangers to accept false money for our services.” But where is the man anywhere working for fixed wages who can afford to vote away half his pay? Demagogues are trying to catch workingmen this time with a bare hook.

• During the 11 months ending with May 31 last the exports of this country amounted to $798,265,351, and the imports to $728,561,261. Mr. Bryan desires to transfer this enormous business from a gold to a silver basis, and calls the operation “a new declaration of independence. ’ ’ Business men desire no such emotional foolishness. What they, want is a full volume of increasing trade, satisfied customlers, and money of unquestioned soundness. It was ex-Speaker Crisp, the free silver Democratic candidate for senator from Georgia, who in his opening speech at. Atlanta handed down to his sympathetic audience as one of the first and ripest fruits of the Cleveland administration a reduction of $25,000,000 in the government’s annual expenses, saved by clipping, off the pensions of Union soldiers. The Democratic glory is that a dollar scissored from a soldier’s pension is a dollar saved.

The studied delay in the adjudication of pension claims at Washington not only robs the pensioners of money rightfully due, but on an average 83 of the old soldiers, so weary of waiting for an allowance of their pensions—a sacred debt of honor—die daily. And then Tillman, one of the apostles of the free silver Democracy, and Crisp, the exspeaker, boast that the Democratic party is “saving $25,000,000 annually in pensions alone!”

The St. Louis Globe-Democrat preaches a short and pithy sermon to every class of wage-earners in saying: “The laboring man who votes the Jacobin ticket votes for a scheme of infiation from which he will reap nothing but eviL Others l may temporarily profit by it, but the man who works for wages will know it only as a curse from its beginning to'its ending.”

The protest against the Chicago platform coming from southern Democrats is far more vigorous and general than was anticipated. There will be no solid south this year, though all the Bryan arithmeticians are claiming it as certain. It is a curious fact that Bryan does not belong to the Democratic party of his own state, but to a bolting faction which nominated a ticket of its own last year and polled only a little over l-20th of the Whole number of votes oast. The Republican party not only wants labor to have steady employment at good wages, but it also wants those wages to be paid in currency of the highest value.