Rensselaer Republican, Volume 27, Number 50, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 August 1896 — SAW HOW FREE SILVER WORKS. [ARTICLE]

SAW HOW FREE SILVER WORKS.

Though a Lifelong Democrat, He will Not Vote for Bryan. Another well-known Hoosier Democrat who finds he cannot conscientiously support the presidential nominee on a free silver platform is Capt. William Schrodt of Jeffersonville, Ind., who is chief bookkeeper for the firm of Harbison & Gathright of this city." Capt. Schrodt has always voted the Democratic ticket previously under all circumstances, but the Populistic dose this time; lie says, is entirely too bitter for him to take. Many years in the life of Capt. Schrodt have , been spent in Mexico, Central America and South America, and he fibserved the free silver plan in its actual workings. To a reporter for the Evening Post he said: “I find it impossible to support Mr. Bryan on the platform upon which he was nominated. He may be a very brilliant young man, and I have no doubt that he is. Still, his monetary views are so decidedly opposite to those I hold that I will uot be able to vote for him.—lt is well enough for,people to talk about free silver, but when they have' lived for years in a country where they have tried it. ns I have, they will not be so rampant for something about Which they now know nothing. It lias been four or five years since I was in Mexico..but I am satisfied that there has lieen little change. There were millions of paupers then, and Mexico will always have the poor with them in large numbers. “One advantage to impoverished families down there was tWftt they could take their silver plate to the mint and have it coined into money, but the poor had no silver plate. Laborers there get 30 cent? a day. as a general thing, but in some remote cases, for skilled labor, the workmen are paid 35 cents. Their silver dollars have plenty of silver in them, and they are heavier than those in the United States, but they are not worth as much. The only way to make a silver dollar worth a dollar is to put a dollar’s worth of silver in it. If this is done one might just as well carry the article about in lumps, and not go to the trouble of having it coined. Down in Central America the country is flooded with silver that is not worth its face value anywhere, even in the sections where it is made. The poor are ground down and pay double prices for everything. while the wages are the same. “I have been in South America, too. where it is used, and the same state of affairs exist there. They tried it, 1 as an experiment, just as is proposed here, and it wilt take a couple of hundred years for the people to recover from it. There are several/silver mines in South America which have been closed for want of capital to continue the work. In fact, the .value_has_ declined, so rapidly that there is no money in having It coined. If every resident of the United States owned a silver mine I could see some sense in liis’ wanting free ’ coinage.”—Louisville Post.