Rensselaer Republican, Volume 27, Number 48, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 August 1896 — How Bryan Has Flopped. [ARTICLE]

How Bryan Has Flopped.

Bryan has not always been a free silverite. There was a time when he did not believe the pUrehasillg power of the (loHar could be regulated by art of ('ingress. The financial ideas he advocates now were not, those he advocated only a few years ago. During the extraordinary session of Congress of 1893. (-ailed by President f’levellmd. Bryan made a .speech in which Ire -derlaved-that—-While the government can say .that a given weight ot' gobi or silver sliall constitute a dollar and invest that dollar with legal tender qualities, it (-annot tlx the purchasing power of the dollar. That must depend upon tire lawot supply and 'ieinaiid. If the number of dollars increases more rapidly, than the need of dollars—as it ltd after the gold discoveries of lS4s>—the ..v----cliangealile value of each dollar Wil! fall and prices rise. - . There was a time, therefore, when Bryan knew that the exchangeable v title of a dollar depended on something besides congressional fiat. He knows it now. He has not changed his tun • l>»»r-.inse hf titty flew light on the subject, but !>•■- cause he is a shifty demagogue in search of an oili'.-e.

At present Bryan, like his fellow Popoera ts,, ascribes the fall in the prices of commodities to the fall in the price of silver. He and they asseverate that ’•the crime of 1873" pulled silver down, ami that it pulled everything else down with it. ,In the wiring of 181)2 Bryan <!>•••;•!rod in speech made by him on the tariff question that the fall in prices must be attributed— , '1 o the inventive geniUs that has multiplied a thousand times, in ma ny instances, the strength of a single arm. ,-itrd, enabled us' to- do today with one man Wh.it tis t v men could not do fifty years ago. That is what brought the prices down in this ,-ouii. try* and everywhere. Then he talked sensibly. ‘Tventive genius," reducing the cost of.prodm tjon or transportation. or both, has brought down the price of abput everything except human hriibr. That is imre using in value from decade to decade. Bryan is as. well awitre now as he was in 1892 that the fall of silver has had nothing to do with the general fall ol prices. Yet he denies in "189<> what lie affirmed in 1892. because he thinks his change of front will help him into the white house. —Chicago Tribune.