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 JOHN P, JONSS 
 Coinage of silver dollars 
 
 5 
 
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 m 
 
 1 
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
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 tl<j pnni30/nuvf)/ 
 USQNia laiHdVNVd 
 
 iNnovNOHin
 
 COINAGE OF SILVER DOLLARS. 
 
 SPEECH 
 
 OF 
 
 HON. JOHN P. JONES, 
 
 OF NEVADA, 
 
 IN THE 
 
 SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES, 
 
 FEBRUARY 14, 1878. 
 
 1878.
 
 '^1 
 
 SPEECH 
 
 OF 
 
 HON. JOHN P . JONES. 
 
 The Seuate Laving under consideration the bill (H. K. ^To. 1093) to authorize the 
 free coinage of the standard silvev dollar and to restore its legal-tender character — 
 
 Mr. JONES, of Nevada, saitl: 
 
 Mr. Pkksident : The discitssion here and elsewhere upon the remone- 
 tization of silver in this countrj', and in respect especially to the pay- 
 ment of the interest and principal of the national bonds in silver dol- 
 lars of 41'i^ grains, has been made to turn almost entirely upon ques- 
 tions of equity. The naked, legal propoir^ition that all outstanding 
 national bonds not specifically payable in lawful money or otherwise 
 than in gold or silver are payable at the option of the Government 
 in either gold or silver coin of the old standard is so clear that but 
 few have been found to squarely deny it and I trust I may not be 
 deemed discourteous when I say no one has fortified his denial with 
 arguments that have reached the iilane of serious criticism. 
 
 But it is vehemently urged that it would be a violation of every 
 principle of justice to pay them in accordance with the strict letter 
 of the law authorizing their issue, on account of the depreciation 
 which it is alleged has taken place in the A'alue of silver since the 
 enactment of the law and that the passage now of a law permitting 
 such payment would dishonor the nation and swindle the public 
 creditor out of a portion of his honest expectations, if not of his just 
 demands. 
 
 It is also claimed that with some modifications the same violation 
 of equity would bo involved in the payment in silver of private, cor- 
 porate, municipal, and State indebtedness. 
 
 This proposition involves first a question of principle and nest a 
 question of fact. 
 
 First. As a question of political ethics, are governments morally 
 bound, in respect of their own debts or generally in respect of the 
 relation between debtor and creditor, to maintain not only invaria- 
 bility in the coin standard, meaning thereby weight and purity of 
 metal, but also to maintain invariability in the commercial value or 
 purchasing power of such coiu ? 
 
 This question was never raised until very modem times nor until 
 the purchasing power of metallic money manifested a decreasing 
 tendency, and was never raised except by the creditors, f undholders, 
 annuitants, and income classes of the world. It was not raised by 
 the business and debtor interests during the forty years after 181>9, 
 when, according to recognized authorities, the value of metallic 
 ftioney, consisting of botli gold and silver, rose fully 145 per cent. 
 sA^ and when the pressure of debts was constantly increasing in corre- 
 
 sponding ratio. The struggling debtor did not then raise this ques- 
 tion of equity nor demand that crwlitors, public or private, should 
 be compelled by law to accept such a diminution in the standard 
 weight of dollars, francs, or sovereigns as would maintain invariiv- 
 
 612537
 
 bility m tbeir commeioial value, nor did they propose to effect that 
 object by increasing the number of the rnouey metals. Nor did the 
 representatives of the people or the public press then maintain that 
 it would be dishonorable in creditors to exact from debtors j)ayment 
 in coin so enormously appreciated. 
 
 The e]»ithet8of swindler and repudiator, according to modern ethics, 
 seem not to apply when, through tlie vicissitudes of mining or other 
 causes, money is rising in value and creditors are thereby enabled to 
 reap where they have not sown, to exact more than they have loaned. 
 Under all circumstances, as it would seem, the interests of the cred- 
 itor classes are to be protected, and if possible enlarged. The epithets 
 of swindler and repudiator are reserved for the debtor classes, when, 
 from the operation of causes which they have not brought about and 
 over which they have no control, a divergence occurs in the value of 
 the money metals, in either of which they have the right to pay if 
 they do not foolishly exercise their option by paying in the dearer 
 metal. They are denounced as lunatics if they demand the privilege 
 of paying in accordance with the precise terms of their contracts. 
 The people are denounced in these dishonoring terms if they dare to 
 resist attempts either to increase the weight of the coins they have 
 promised or to diminish the number of the money metals existing 
 when tlie contracts were made. 
 
 The doctrine that governments shonld guarantee the exchangeable 
 value of metallic money as well as its weight and purity was bi-oached 
 for the first time when the sudden flood of gold from California and 
 Australia had begun to make itself manifest through an increase in 
 general prices. It was then that the creditor interest, which had 
 never proposed prior to 1849 that the rise in the value of money which 
 was then occurring should be prevented by legislation, were clamor- 
 ous in the name of honor and good faith, national and individual, 
 that the threatened fall should be prevented. The measures pro- 
 posed to accomplish this end have been to diminish the volume of 
 money in existence by demonetizing one of the metals, or when that 
 was impracticable to limit the coinage of one of the metals. These 
 measures they have induced several governments to adopt, and if 
 they shall prove insufficient their next steps will be to propose to 
 demonetize both the metala and to adopt some other kind of money 
 which shall hold out the promise of greater scarcity. 
 
 So far as this question of honor and equity is concerned, I shall con- 
 tent myself at this time with declaring my deliberate conviction to 
 be that the metallic-money system loses the only recommendation 
 which it has if its value is not remitted to the automatic limitation 
 of production without any governmental interference whatever. On 
 this point I agree with all the advocates of metallic money, from John 
 Locke down to the Senator from Vermont, [Mr. Edmunds.] In a 
 speech delivered in the Senate on December 5, 18G7, Mr. Edmunds 
 said: 
 
 Our own gold and silver coins always have been and arc still defined by law to 
 contain in each denomination, be it a dime, a dollar, or an eagle, a certain named 
 wei'^ht ol' silver or gold. They are the ultimates of value, the money of the Gov- 
 ernment. 
 
 And he fortified his position by quotations from John Locke, whose 
 works he declared to be a " boon to mankind," one of these quota- 
 tions being as follows : 
 
 All contracts or engagements are to be deemed fully discharged and satisfied by 
 payment of the specitic quantity or sum of money agreed upon, without having 
 any regard to the value of money with respect to othei' things at the ditfereut times 
 of contracting and discharging of debts.
 
 This QTiotatii))), of his own Rolection, from his favorite authority, 
 will, I have no doiiht, be conclnsive with tlie Sitnator from Vermont, 
 and onght to be concln;<ive with the Senate, upon the .juHtice and 
 equity of paying debts in strict accordance with the letter of the con- 
 tract. The question of fnct, whether or not silver has lost purchasing 
 power in a correspf)ndin sj ratio to the widening of the relation between 
 it and gold since 1H73, or whether it has lost purchasing power to any 
 i^xtent whatever since that time, is the particular question which I 
 now propose brieflj' to discuss. I think it will be made very clearly 
 to ai)pear that silver since 187;5, although discrowned and shorn of 
 its monetary function, denied mintage throughout the entire western 
 world, and degraded to the rank of a commodity, instead of having 
 become less valuable has nevertheless increased in its command over 
 services and all kinds of property; that both gold and silver have 
 gained in purchasing power, and that silver only seems to have fallen 
 in value because it has not risen to so great an extent as gold. 
 
 If these positions can be established, or if all the known facts tend 
 to establish them, then the equital)le objection to the payment of the 
 national bonds in silver dollars of 412^ grains completely fails and 
 must be abandoned. Even if it were true as a question of honorable 
 interpretation of the contract and of the duties of the Government 
 relative to its money, that it is bound to maintain the commercial 
 value of its coin, the payment of its debts in silver dollars of the old 
 standard could violate no rule of justice or honor if the power in ex- 
 change of 4124 grains of the commoility silver is now as greater greater 
 than was the power in exchange of a coined dollar of that weight in 
 187.3, which was then both the legal and market equivalent of the 
 gold dollar. 
 
 Exchangeable value is the only kind of value with which econo- 
 mists have to deal. What is it and where does it reside ? This ques- 
 tion has been often asked and variously answered. I will not elabo- 
 rate the reasons supporting the definition of it which I shall give. 
 Exchangeable value resides iu the human mind. It is the mental 
 estimation or appreciation of desirable objects or things, and is 
 measured by the sacrifice which it is necessary to make in order to 
 obtain them. Hence it follows that the value of the money in which 
 debts are paid must be measured by the sacrifice which nations and 
 individuals are required to make in order to obtain it. The question 
 whether money has appreciated or depreciated between two given 
 periods can be solved only by a compariaon of the sacrifices iu labor 
 a,nd property necessary for its acquisition at the two periods respect- 
 ively. Under this definition, has silver depreciated in value within 
 the last five years ? Does it require less sacrifice of labor or property 
 to acquire a silver dollar of 412+ grains than it did when it was de- 
 monetized f Is it a ninety-cent dollar ? 
 
 Has the commercial value of silver diminished since September, 
 1873, when its market price was fifty-nine pence in gold per ounce, and 
 when, therefore, the silver and gold dollais under the legal relation 
 in this country were coincident in value f 
 
 Will a given weight of silver exchange now for less, of not one 
 or two but of the general range of commodities that enter into the 
 consumption and use of mankind, than it would then t Has it lost 
 since then purchasing power ? Will it buy less of labor, of houses, or 
 of lands ? Will it purchase less of the necessities, comforts, conven- 
 iences or luxuries of life now than then ? 
 
 Bastiat, in his terse economical definitions, says that value is the 
 relation which services and commodities bear to each other in ex- 
 change. Does a given weight of silver bear a lower relation in
 
 6 
 
 excbaiift-e to other tbings generally than it did when the silver dollar 
 of 412^ grains was the commercial e(iuivalent of the present gold 
 dollar I It is true that the gold dollar will now purchase 10 per cent, 
 more silver than it Avould in the fall of 1873 ; is it not equally true 
 that it will i>urchase in every country an average of twice 10 per 
 cent, more of all other things than it would then ? 
 
 In deciding whether silver has or has not depreciated in value it is 
 indispensable that all the facts bearing upon the question be viewed 
 from a proper point of observation. In order to discover the direc- 
 tion in which a boat ismoving when headed to the current the shore 
 and not the stream must be observed. Upon an alteration in the ex- 
 change relations between two commodities or between a single com- 
 modity and money, it is apparent as between them alone that one has 
 risen or that the other has fallen in value. But in order to decide 
 correctly which has really risen and which really fallen, comparison 
 must be made between their present relations respectively and their 
 previous relations to all other things in exchange. 
 
 A fall in the price of any one commodity would be justly regarded 
 as a fall in its value and not as a rise in the value of money, and such 
 fall might, to all appearances, overtake one commodity after another 
 until the whole range of commodities and services would seem to have 
 fallen and money would seem to have remained stationary. But all 
 sound thinkers and writers on economical science agree that this ia 
 impossible and that a fall in general prices is the sure and only proof 
 of a rise in the value of money. But to the casual observer it would 
 seem otherwise, because a rise in the value of the " monetary unit 
 comes in such an impenetrable disguise that probably few minds are 
 even prepared to entertain the idea of such an alteration having oc- 
 curred." 
 
 The Englishman who looks through spectacles made of gold sov- 
 ereigns believes without a single doubt— in fact knows— that for the 
 past four years he has seen silver fluctuating and falling in value. 
 The citizen of this country, looking through the metallic monetary 
 unit last in use here, and with which he is most familiar, or when he 
 borrows the Englishman's spectacles, thinks he sees the same thing; 
 But the East Indian, who looks through spectacles made of silver ' 
 rupees, is equally contideut that during the same period he has seen 
 gold fluctuating' and rising. The occupants of railroad cars on con- 
 tiguous and parallel lines, one of which is in motion and passing the 
 other, iuay be easily mistaken, if thfey have no landmark to govern 
 their conclusions, as to which car is moving. The occupants of each 
 would be sure that the other was in motion if the cars moved as 
 silently and insensiljly as do values. 
 
 If the cars were moving on east and west lines, they would be very 
 apt to differ as to the process by which one had reached a point to 
 the eastward of the other, and it might be true in fact, contrary to 
 their concurring opinions, that both had moved to the westward, the 
 one having moved farther to the westward than the other. 
 
 Countless generations of men have lived and died in the unhesitat- 
 ing belief in the geocentric theory of the universe and with the fullest 
 coutidence that the sun always Jiad revolved and would always con- 
 tinue to revolve around the earth once in every twenty-four hours. 
 One of the deputation of distinguished New York and Philadelphia 
 bankers and merchants that visited this city for the puri)ose of sub- 
 mitting arguments and jnotests against the passage of a bill remon- 
 etiziug silver energetically insisted, in a speech before the Finance 
 Committee of this body, that silver was an uuflt commodity on which 
 to confer the monetary function on account of its eccentric tendency
 
 \ 
 
 to fluctuations in value; that tlioso fluctuations liarl been constantly 
 occurring and had within a few years covered a range of more than 
 yO per cent., while on the other hand gold had shown the most stub- 
 horn immobility, not having changed in value more than one-fourth of 
 1 per cent, in thirty years. Upon being asked what standard he had 
 used in measuring the two metals respectively in ascertaining that 
 one of them fluctuated so largely and the other so slightly, he an- 
 swertMl tiiat he treated them alike, that he referred them to the same 
 measure, gold. 
 
 In other words, lie sought to demonstrate the invariability of the 
 value of gold, and consequently its superior fitness for money, by the 
 astounding historical fact that the fluctuations in value between one 
 ounce of gold and another had not been more than one-fourth of 1 
 per cent, in thirty years. Western financiers may not be able to see 
 clearly how gold measured by itself could in eons of ages fluctuate 
 even as much as one-fourth of 1 per cent; and in their simplicity I 
 am sure they will not doubt that lueasui'ed in that way it will con- 
 tinue for uu)re than thirty years to come as changeless as the events 
 of the past. They may, however, be dishonest and reckless enough 
 to assert and maintain that had silver been used as the standard of 
 comparison gold instead of silver would have seemed to be the fluc- 
 tuating metal, while the value of silver would have seemed to re- 
 main iniinovable. 
 
 The idea that gold is the nuraovnng, unvarying center of value, 
 arouiul which all other values rev<dve iu eccentric, irregular orbits, is 
 exi)ressed in a letter from Mr. Royal Phelps, a distinguished New 
 York merchant, to the United States monetary commission, in the 
 following extraordinary statement : 
 
 Gold never rises or falls; it is now the sole and nniversal standard of valne. 
 Everytliii!<!r else which is exchanged or traded for rises or falls in accordance with 
 theabuudiiucc or scarcity of this one metal. 
 
 Literally translated, this language conveys the idea that, while all 
 other things may rise or fall in value relatively to gold, gold itself, 
 rising superior to the economic laws that regulate and govern values, 
 remains unchanged in its relations and unmoved in value. 
 
 The present Secretary of the Treasury, in a public speech not long 
 since dt>livcred, referred to the value of gold as being " as fixed as 
 the sun." 
 
 In one section of this country no other doctrine is promulgated. 
 An influential school of political economists dogmatically asserts 
 that it is of no consequence that Germany has made a new and large 
 <leman<l for gold and that tlie United States is now making another 
 and still larger demand for it, and that the same thing is being done 
 by other countries that have <lemonetized silver; and that it imports 
 nothing th.-tt the yield of gold is diminishing year by year. 
 
 This school shuts its eyes to the flood of light that facts and philos- 
 ophy are sheildiug all around it and stubbornly insists that the laws 
 which govern and regulate all other values are suspended as to gold, 
 and that gold never rises and falls, but is as " fixed as the sun." So 
 did not teach John Locke when he said nearly two centuries ago : 
 
 If you increase or lessen the qn.intity of money cnirent in traffic, iu any place, 
 then the alteration of value is in the nioney. 
 
 And, again : 
 
 Money beinj; looked upon as the standing measure of other commodities, men 
 consider and speak ot' it still as if it wore a standing measure, though when it has 
 varied its qnanUty it is i^Iaiu it is not. 
 
 And so have taught ail the economists since Locke's time, until new
 
 8 
 
 and strange {loctrines M'ere found to be nece.ssary to justify the strik- 
 ing down of one of the two money metals of the world. 
 
 The rise or fall in the absolute value of gold and silver, respectively, 
 cannot be determined by a comparison of their values relatively to 
 each other. That can only be determined by a comparison between 
 their present and previous relations to all other things in exchange 
 by a comparison of their present with their previous purchasing 
 power over land, labor, and commodities. A decrease of general 
 prices signifies a rise in the value of money, and an increase signifies 
 a fall. 
 
 The same rule applies to any one single commodity, to the value of 
 which the values of all other thin^jjs are referred. This test by which 
 changes in the value of money are detected is not, by reason of the 
 incompleteness of statistics and of the difficulty of ascertaining the 
 precise weight of all the disturbing circumstances surroundiug the 
 case, as exact as the tests by which weights, measures, and distances 
 are determined. Money is the measure of the value of all other 
 thijigs, but cannot be the measure of itself. Its value is determined 
 not by the price of one thing or many thiugs, but by the average price 
 of all things, by the general relations which it bears in exchange. 
 
 If the value of all other things is measured by money and expressed 
 in the units of money through the medium of price, it follows that 
 the value of money can only be measured by all other things and 
 nmst be expressed in the units of property and services. Thus if a 
 bushel of wheat or a yard of silk or a day's labor is worth a dollar, 
 these three thiugs only being considered, the value of a dollar would 
 be a bushel of wheat, a yard of silk, or a day's labor. If a cup meas- 
 ures a quart of liquid, the quart of liquid determines the capacity 
 of the cup. If money measures all thiugs, it is plain that all things 
 measure money, and that to deterraiue whether money has risen or 
 fallen, during any given period, it becomes necessary to ascertain 
 whether the quantities of all other things, on the average, offered 
 in exchange for it are greater or less at the commencement and end 
 of such period. This plain rule demonstrates how unreliable a meas- 
 ure gold alone would be of the value of silver. Men are so accus- 
 tomed, however, to refer the value of everything to money that they 
 insensibly think and speak of it as if its value were invariable, just 
 as they think and speak of the sun rising and setting, and of the earth 
 as fixed, though they know upon reflection that such is not the fact. 
 
 It is true that there may be a diversity of methods of determining 
 what the average range of current prices is, and what it may have 
 been at some anterior period. Practically, however, unless the change 
 in prices has been A^ery slight, there can be no difficulty in determin- 
 ing whether they have generally fallen or risen. While there have 
 been unimportant dift'erences as to the extent of the fall which oc- 
 curred in the value of metallic money after the discovery of America, 
 the fact that a fall in its value did take place at that period has 
 never been disputed, nor has it ever been disputed that money rose 
 in value dui'ing the first half of this ceiitury, nor that it again fell 
 after the opening of the mines of California and Australia. I do not 
 hesitate to affirm that an examination of all the facts bearing upon 
 the case, a few of whicli I propose to refer to, will demonstrate that 
 gold again began to rise about ten years ago, and especially about 
 five years ago, as measured by commodities, land, and lavOf) siud that 
 its rise is still unchecked ; and that this last rise of golt, us so meas- 
 iired, has been so greatly in excess of its rise as compared with silver 
 as to show that silver has not fallen in value ; or, in other words, 
 Ihat the average fall in the gold price of commodities has been so
 
 9 
 
 TOiich greater than the fall in thp ffolil pric« of' silver as to niakethe 
 concla.sion irresistible that silver instead of having depreciated in 
 value during the last few years has actually appreciated, though not 
 to the same extent as gi)ld. 
 
 The resolution of the German Empire to substitute a gold for asil- 
 ver standard was adopted December 4, lyTl, and although the Ger- 
 man law regulating all the details of the substitution was not passed 
 until 1H7;{, the new gold coinage was commenced at once. By the 
 <M)d of 1872 this coinage had amounted to twenty-one millions ster- 
 ling or more than |100,U0(),0(J0. (See London Economist of March 
 15, 1873.) This was a serious drain upon the gold markets of the 
 world, and immediately tended to produce a fall in prices which was 
 temporarily checked by corresponding extensions of credit. The 
 oifect of the German movement, which is still a continuing one, upon 
 the v:ilue of gold and, consequently, upon gold prices, is generally 
 well known, but a careful examination and comparison of market 
 reports and ])rice8-current since then, especially in gold-standard 
 countries, will present the facts of the case in a more precise and 
 definite fctrm. 
 
 The New York Public of May 18, 187G, published elaborate tables 
 of the wholesale prices in New York City of the principal articles of 
 commerce, foreign and domestic, as they stood on the 1st day of May 
 in various years, and covering all the years from 1872 to 1876, both 
 inclusive. As that city is the chief center of the import and export 
 trade of the United States, and as communication with it from all 
 parts of the country is unsurpassed in cheai)ness and convenience, the 
 wholesale prices of any locality must substantially correspond with 
 those in New York. As is well known, there is a diversity of opinion 
 as to the true mode of deducing the average of prices from tables of 
 prices of a large number of articles at anyone period so as to equalize 
 surrounding conditions and make a satisfactory comparison with the 
 average of prices of some other period. 
 
 The method actually adopted by The Public was to take quantities 
 of diffei-ent articles, proportioned to the relative quantities produced, 
 or purchased in this country, and to compare the aggregate cost of such 
 quantities in ditterent years, the quantities calculated being of course 
 exactly the same in each of the years compared. This method of 
 deducing an average of prices has the indorsement of recognized au- 
 thorities in this country and in Europe. The tables furnished by The 
 Public show that the same quantities of breadstutTs, cotton, coal, iron, 
 leather, tobacco, wool, butter and cheese, sugar and molasses, provis- 
 ions, cottVe and tea, which could have. been bought at wholesale in 
 New York on May 1, 1872, for $85, could be bought on May 1, 1876, 
 for $i>i). This shows a fall in the average price of the articles named, 
 between those dates of about 19 per cent. These were currency 
 l)rices at both dates, but as the premium on gold was almost exactly 
 the same at the two dates, the fall in gold prices could not vary much 
 from the fall in currency prices, and was in fact a little greater, as 
 the premium on gold was three-eighths of 1 per cent, more in May, 
 1872, than it was in 1876. 
 
 The Loudon Economist, commenting, September 23, 1S76, on the 
 tables of The Public, said : 
 
 Accoidiiig to these figures, $09 would go as far iu 1876 as #85 in 1872, and iii the 
 opinion of most people would go much further. 
 
 The London Economist has never estimated the average decline in 
 the wholesale prices of merchandise iu England between 1872-'73aad 
 1876-'77 at less than 20 per cent.
 
 10 
 
 The Economist maiutains in respect to British exports that the 
 decline in their aggregate values is the accurate measure of the 
 decline in their prices, and that no reductiou in the quantity of ex- 
 ports, taken together, is shown. Thus on the lUth of February, 1877, 
 this journal said : 
 
 The exports possess the characteristics we have for many months past endeav- 
 ored to bring ont, that the diminiithm in the quantities of some of tlie chief 
 articles exported is trifling as compared with the diminution of their values, la 
 several other cases there is a real and considerable increase in the qutintities. 
 Since 1872 there has been a gradual decrease in their value month by mouth. In 
 that year the average monthly exi)Oit was £-21,355,000. In 1ST3 itwas £2l,'2tj'l,000. 
 In 1874 it was £19,903,000. lii 1875, £1S,G25,0U0, and during last year the gradual 
 fall was continued. 
 
 The tables of The Economist show that the average monthly export 
 for 187<i Avas £16,714,U00. The prices of iron and coal have fallen 
 very much more than 20 per cent., and very much more tlian the 
 average fall in the prices of other commodities, in Great Britain since 
 1«72. From a comparison of the quantities and values exported, as 
 given in the board of trade returns, the following are shown to have 
 been the average x>i'ices per ton during the year 1873 and the lirst six 
 months of 1877, respectivelj" : 
 
 Commodities. 
 
 Iron and steel, law 
 
 Pig and puddled iron 
 
 Total iron and steel, raw and manufactured 
 Coal 
 
 
 
 rir.st six 
 
 1873 
 
 
 months of 
 
 1877. 
 
 $64 
 
 51 
 
 $41 23 
 
 30 
 
 17 
 
 14 19 
 
 61 
 
 84 
 
 42 34 
 
 5 05 
 
 2 57 
 
 appears from these returns that during 1873 the total export of 
 and steel, raw and manufactured, amounted to 2,957,813 tons, at 
 
 It 
 
 iron , , . 
 
 a total valuation of £37,731,239, while during the lirst six months 
 of 1877 it was 1,118,183 tons, at a valuation of £9,792,326. The ex- 
 port of coals during 1873 was 12,617,566 tons, at a total valuation of 
 £13,188,511, while during the first six months of 1877 it was 7,344,883 
 tons, at a total valuation of £3,773,920. 
 
 In order to bring down this record of falling prices in England to 
 the latest accessible dates, I will read the following from an article 
 on "The course of prices of commodities" in 1877, to be found in the 
 London Economist of January 5, 1878 : 
 
 It was to the end of July, 1877, that we carried our record of weeldy prices, 
 when last writing upon the 'subject. In nearly every article upon our list, except 
 wheat and saltp'eter, there had been a decline of market value. Week by week 
 during the last five months of the year now closed there has been so general a de- 
 cline of prices that it is scarcely needful to particularize. Iron, coal, and coflee 
 are, however, all down, tin showing exceptional steadiness, the group ot articles 
 of food showing a general decline. Beef has fallen since the summer and the 
 decline in coifee, together with the falling off in excise returns, reminds us that 
 the laboring mass of the population has now less than of late to spend upon neces- 
 sities and comforts of life. . . ^ -l. 
 
 The close of the year affords a good opportunity for pointing with eflfect to the 
 steady, continuous," and serious decline which has affected the markets for the com- 
 modities in which the chief trade of England consists. Although the fall in prices 
 has been long continued and severe no one can pretend to say that the <lepressed 
 period is at an end and that prices must soon tend to recover. 
 
 The following is a statement of the comparative prices in London
 
 11 
 
 at the close of tlie years 1873 and 1877 of articles selected for the 
 purpose by the London Economist : 
 
 Articles. 
 
 Prices at 
 
 the close 
 
 of 1873. 
 
 Prices at 
 
 the close 
 
 of 1877. 
 
 Fall in 
 prices. 
 
 & g. d. 
 3 18 
 2 12 
 
 4 2 
 
 5 5 
 
 £ s. d. 
 
 2 11 9 
 
 2 6 
 
 2 10 
 
 5 
 
 Percent^ 
 
 IC. 1 
 
 11.5 
 
 32. 
 
 7.7 
 
 5 
 
 a3 
 
 115 
 
 8 
 
 19 15 
 
 2 11 
 66 
 66 
 
 15 10 
 
 6 
 
 
 
 I" 
 
 48.5 
 20.5 
 42.6 
 19.6 
 21.6 
 
 18 
 5 7 
 
 14 
 4 4 
 
 6 
 9 
 4| 
 
 19.5 
 20.8 
 38.3 
 
 I. — Xative products : 
 
 Wheat, Gazette average quarter 
 
 Flonr, town made 
 
 Beef, inferior: per stone 
 
 Beef, prime, per stoue 
 
 n. — Eaw materials : 
 
 Scotch pi^t-iron, per ton 
 
 Copper, Chili, per ton 
 
 Tin, Straits, per ton 
 
 Cotton, niiddlinj;; Upland, per pound — 
 "VVool, Southdown, per pack 
 
 m. — Tropical product.s : 
 Snfrar, Muscovado, per hundred- weight 
 
 Coffee, Ceylon, per hundro<l-weight 
 
 Pepper, Natal, per pound 
 
 The average fall in price of the above articles, taking them nnmer- 
 ically and without reference to their relative quantities, is 24.9 per 
 cent. During the same time the gold price of an ounce of silver in 
 London fell from 57ld. to 53ff7., being a fall of 7.11 per cent. The 
 silver prices, therefore, of the commodities named fell 17.79 per cent. 
 The period covered by this comparison is somewhat dift'erent from 
 that covered by the tables of the New York Public and the articles 
 selected for comparison are somewhat dift'erent. Both comparisons, 
 however, attest the same general fact that silver has recently risen 
 rather than fallen in its exchangeable value. 
 
 As the wholesale prices of articles of commerce in all gold-stand- 
 ard countries rise and fall in substantial correspondence with their 
 rise and fall in Great Britain, it is thus conclusively established that 
 theinirchasing power of gold over commodities generally has increased 
 in a very much greater ratio since 1872 than it has over silver bull- 
 ion. I have not deemed it necessary to burden the record, as I might 
 easily do, with extracts from economical and miscellaneous publica- 
 tions in every portion of every land giving accounts of a stagnation 
 of industry and commerce and a fall in gold prices as great if not 
 greater than has been shown to have taken place in Great Britain, 
 and with forebodings for the future even more gloomy than those of 
 the London Economist. This distress, felt everywhere, presses with- 
 the most intense severity upon the gold-standard countries. 
 
 The only great country which exhibits any degree of prosperity is 
 France, which maintains a silver circulation of $300,000,000, on a val- 
 uation of silver equal to 400, instead of 412+, grains to the dollar, an 
 proposed in the bill under consideration. As a proof and illustration 
 of this is the fact, stated by the Moniteur des Int^rdts Mat^riels of 
 Brussels, the highest authority on such subjects, that the total new 
 investments in all Europe in industrial undertakings, including rail- 
 roads, during the year 1877 was $330,000,000, of which $285,000,000 
 was invested in France alone. And even in France there are now 
 unmistakable premonitions of approaching stagnation in trade and 
 industry, caused doubtless by the unwise suspension for a year and a 
 half of the coinage of silver. The invasion of " hard times," which
 
 12 
 
 lias scarcely yet reached tlie shores of Fiance, can be successfully mefc 
 and resisted only by a return without reserve to its old policy of un- 
 restricted coinage of silver. 
 
 It is a proposition whi(;h cannot be overthrown by facts and figures, 
 that the fall in silver relatively to gold since 1872 has never been as 
 great as has been the fall in the gold price of commodities except on 
 one single day, July 8, ld76, which was a Black Friday in the London 
 silver market, when in the language of a circular issued by Pixley & 
 Abell, London bullion brokers, there was an " exceptional sale at 4(5f 
 pence" in gold per ounce. The general i-ange of the recent so-called 
 depreciation of silver as measured in gold has been about 10 per cent., 
 whereas the gold prices of the general range of commodities has fallen 
 at least 20 per cent. Unless the facts cited as to the condition of the 
 markets can be overthrown, the conclusion cannot be avoided that the 
 real value of silver, which is measured by its purchasing or exchange- 
 able power, instead of having fallen has to a very considerable degree 
 risen within the last five years. 
 
 The conclusion that silver has not fallen in value is further fortified 
 by the fact, of which the proofs are decisive, that in India, contain- 
 ing an industrious population of 237,000,000, with silver as their sole 
 standard, there has been a general fall rather than a rise in the prices 
 of commodities, including both imports and exports. Nor have silver 
 prices risen in any other portion of Asia. A. A. Low, a leading mer- 
 chant of New York, engaged in the China trade, testified before the 
 United States monetary commission to the fact, which is otherwise 
 well established, that since l»72-'73 there has been a fall in the silver 
 price of tea, the principal export of China. It is true that during a 
 portion of that time, there was a rise in the silver price of raw silk, a 
 less important but still not unimportant article of export from China. 
 This rise, however, is well known to have been attributable to the 
 failure of the silk crop of Italy and France. Silk has since then very 
 materially fallen in price, and its tendency is still downward. As to 
 imports in China from Europe, their prices have necessarily fallen in 
 the same proportion as in India. In those two markets having the 
 same money standard there must always be a substantial correspond- 
 ence in the prices of the same articles. 
 
 In respect to the silver prices of tiie exports of India, the United 
 States monetary commission quote from a letter (New York Evening' 
 Post, October 26, 1876) from J. S.Moore, who had long been engaged 
 in the India trade and who has never ceased to take an interest in 
 its condition, and who has carefully observed and collated the facts 
 relating to it. In this letter Mr. Moore states, among other things : 
 
 Indian productions are at present at their lowest ebl) as compared during fiftcea 
 
 years. 
 
 The monetary commission also note the fact that at a meeting in 
 London in September, 1876, of the stockholders in the Oriental Bank, 
 whose principal business connection is with the India trade, the pres- 
 ident said that with few exceptions India products were so low that 
 even a general war could not make them worse. The commission 
 also quote the following as the reported summary of the conclusions 
 announced by the governor and council of India in a minute adopted 
 September 22, 1876, on the subject of silver, and as an answer to the 
 petition of the Bombay Chamber of Commerce that the coinage of the 
 tjilver rupees should be limited : 
 
 First. Gold has riser in valua since March, 1873, and especially since last De- 
 ceitiher.
 
 13 
 
 Second. It is not shown that .silver has fallen in value, i. e. as compared with 
 couiuiouities in general, either in London or in India during the aame period. 
 
 Nearly every heading journal, financial and otherwise, indorsed with 
 scarcely any reservation the reasoning and conchLsions of the govtr- 
 uor ami council. 
 
 The full text of the minute of September 22, 187G, has now^een 
 received, together with a note addressed by the governor general to 
 the home government, bearing date the 9th of February, 1877. From 
 the full text of this minute I extract the following : 
 
 The recent change in the value of silver measured in gold mav be due to changes 
 erf one metal or the other, or both. Before a fit remedv can be applied it is essen- 
 tial to ascertain exactly what has happened, whether go"ld has lisen or silver fallen, 
 and how much the value of either luetal has changed. It cannot be a.ssuined with- 
 out decisive pi-oof that the divergence of the two metala is due wholly or even 
 •hiefly to the fall in the value of silver. 
 
 The long continuous equilibrium between the value of gold and that of silver is 
 due to the two metals having shared, without material change of conditions, the 
 only great held for the employment of either of them, t. e. the supply of legal-tender 
 metallic money. This equilibrium has been disturbed by the rapid supersession 
 of silver by gold in Europe and America as the standard of value, and, therefore, 
 as the material of legal-tender metallic money. This supersession is calculated 
 a priori to raise the value of gold no less than to lower the value of silver. 
 
 The prices of commodities and precious metals in London and India witness to 
 a considerable rise in the value of gold since March, 1873, and especiallv since De- 
 cember. 1875, and do not .show any fall in the value of silver measured'iu commo- 
 dities other than gold. 
 
 On the 2d of February, 1?77, the governor of India telegraphed to 
 the home goverumeut as follows : 
 
 Prices in India do not as yet show any fall in the value of silver. 
 
 And on the 9th of February, 1H77, as already stated, the governor 
 addressed a note to the home government on the same subject. This 
 note is accompanied by tables of the prices in silver in Bombay and 
 Calcutta, of the leading articles both of import and export, covering 
 the entire year ld73 and coming down to February, L677. Upon 
 these tables he observes in respect to imports " that the Hilver prices of 
 imported goods in India have hot risen, and the circumstances would ap- 
 pear to have been unfavorable to importers." And in respect to exports 
 he observes that " upon the whole these tables do not appear to in- 
 dicate any decrease in the value of silver." 
 
 Of the imports at Calcutta the only article which shows a rise of 
 price is spelter, (zinc;) to that article are added in the Bombay ta- 
 bles Chinese silk and coffees from Mocha and Malabar. The fall iu 
 the prices in imports at both cities has been general, and in the lead- 
 ing articles it has been great between 1873 and the beginning of 
 lb77. Thus in gray shirtings it is 15 per cent, at Bombay and 18 per 
 cent, in Calcutta, and in iron it is about double this. 
 
 I need scarcely refer to the condition of the iron trade of this country. 
 It is graphically set forth in the columns of the Philadelphia Bulletin 
 of the Iron and Steel Association of December 26, 1877. The prices 
 given are currency prices, but after allowing for the fall in the gold 
 premium, a reduction of gold prices during the year 1877 is still shown, 
 although the enormous reductions of price already reached in 1876 had 
 created a general belief that they could not by possibility go any lower. 
 The Bulletin says : 
 
 The following table, which we have compiled from the remarkablv accurate 
 reports of Thomas Hobson, the Philadelphia ioiTe8;)ondent of the Xew York Iron
 
 14 
 
 Age, shows tlie average range of prices of four leading iron and steel products 
 during the year : 
 
 Month B. 
 
 Pig-iron in 
 Philadel- 
 phia. 
 
 Refined bar 
 in Philadel- 
 phia. 
 
 Steel rails at 
 works. 
 
 Ordinary 
 iron raiia 
 at works. 
 
 
 130 75 
 20 00 
 20 00 
 19 50 
 19 00 
 18 75 
 18 25 
 18 00 
 18 25 
 18 50 
 18 00 
 18 00 
 
 «48 72 
 47 60 
 47 04 
 44 80 
 44 80 
 44 80 
 44 80 
 44 80 
 44 80 
 44 80 
 1 44 80 
 44 80 
 
 $49 00 
 49 00 
 49 00 
 49 00 
 47 25 
 46 50 
 45 25 
 44 75 
 44 00 
 42 25 
 40 50 
 40 50 
 
 $34 .50 
 
 February 
 
 33 75 
 33 00 
 
 April ..-- 
 
 33 00 
 
 "Nf av 
 
 33 00 
 
 
 33 00 
 
 (Tiilv ......>> 
 
 33 00 
 
 August 
 
 32 75 
 
 September 
 
 31, 00 
 30 50 
 
 
 31 00 
 
 December 
 
 32 00 
 
 
 18 92 
 
 45 55 
 
 45 58 
 
 32 54 
 
 
 
 The figures above given show a steady decline in the price of pig-iron from S20.75 
 in January to |18 in August, when the decline may be said to have been perma- 
 nently arrested, as prices have since remained practically stationary, with a hard- 
 ening tendency. In bar iron the price has fallen from $48.72 for best refined in 
 January to 144.80 for the same quality in December. Steel rails have fallen from 
 $49 at the works in .January to 140.50 in December. Iron rails of ordinary quality 
 have fallen from S34.50 in January to $32 in December. All these are the lowest 
 prices ever quoted in this country, if we except the price of pig-iron in colonial 
 days. In later days, prior to 1877, the lowest average yearly price of No. 1 anthra- 
 cite foundery pig-'ii-on was in 1661, the first year of the war, when it was $20.25, the 
 lowest average monthly price touched during the year being $18.62^ in October. 
 The lowest monthly average price in 1877 was in Auiiist, November, and Decem- 
 ber, when it was |18 ; the average for the year was |18.92. Charcoal pigiron has 
 never been so low as anthracite. Previous to the present era of low prices, the 
 lowest point touched in the price of best refined bar iron was $52.50 per gross ton 
 from March to July, 1852 ; and the lowest average reached in any year was $54.66 
 in 1851. In April, '1877, best refined bar iron fell to $44.80 a ton, and at this price it 
 remained to the close of the year. The average price for the year was $45.55. Steel 
 rails were first made on order in this country in 1867, and in January, 1868, they 
 were sold at $165. In December, 1877, contracts for steel rails were made at $40, 
 and the average price for the month was only §40.50. Tlie average price for the 
 year was $45.58. Previous to the present perioii of low prices the lowest point 
 touched in the price of iron rails was $36.50 a ton in November and December, 1861, 
 and in January and February, 1862 ; and the lowest average reached in any year 
 was $41.75 in 1862. In October, 1877, iron rails fell to $30.50, and the average price 
 for the year was $32.54. 
 
 The foregoing comparisons exhibit the depressed condition of the American iron 
 trade at the close of 1877 in a lisrht that requires little comment. The low wages, 
 the small profits or no profits at all, the bankruptcies, the pinching, the anxiety, 
 and the weariness of spirit which have accompanied the great faU in prices can 
 easily be surmised. 
 
 The closing year has been one of extreme discouragement to American iron- 
 masters and their workmen. 
 
 The depression in nearly every industry in this country has been 
 most severe, although in iron it may be exceptionally great. Volumes 
 might be filled with the evidences of falling markets and of the uni- 
 versality of the business disasters since 1873.- 
 
 No answer is made to these exhibitions of the fall of general prices 
 since 1872-73 except the shallow and deceptive one of selecting hero 
 and there some isolated article which may have risen in price during 
 that period from peculiar causes, or some isolated article which rnay 
 liave risen in price during apart of that period, such as wheat during 
 the first part of 1877, from the breaking out of the Russo-Turkish 
 war, or the rise in raw silk, which continued for a short time after the 
 failiu-e of crops in leading silk-producing countries. Few will be
 
 15 
 
 deceived by answers of that kind, except those wlio wish to be de- 
 ceived. The broad j^cneral fact, that within live years the general 
 prices of coninioditifs have fallen more than has'the gold price of 
 silver during the same period is written all over the market quota- 
 tions of every part of the world and is known to everybody iu the 
 current experience of life. 
 
 The Public, from whose tables I have quoted, is now behind none of 
 the New York newspapers in the glibness and llippancy which charac- 
 terize a majority of them in afitirming that the only wise and honest 
 thing for this country to do is to i)ay its debts, national, corporate, 
 and individual, in gold, which its own tables of prices as well as its 
 own editorials, which I shall hereafter quote, show has been enor- 
 mously appreciated by depriving silver of the monetary function and 
 by^devolving upon gold alone the functions before performed by both 
 metals. 
 
 The Public now goes as far as those who go farthest in denouncing 
 as a swindling scheme the proposition to restore to silver the func- 
 tions of which it was shorn by legislation foolishly criminal, or cuini- 
 inally foolish, and in the denunciation of its advocates as the con- 
 trivers of a delKised, degraded, and depreciated money, and as idiots, 
 swindlers, and lunatics. And I may here remark that this discussion 
 has signally illustrated the long-known fact that the deniicr ressort ot 
 the supporters of a bad cause is always to supply the place of solid 
 arguments which they lack with ridicule, vituperation, and abuse, 
 which are always as cheap as they are abundant. In the case of The 
 Public there is added to the pique of a defeated casuist the zeal of 
 a new convert, as will api^ear from the following short extracts from 
 its columns in 187G : 
 
 [From The Public, August 3, 1876.] 
 
 Prices of commoditiea generally have declined iu all lauds in which gold is the 
 measure at least as much a,s 20 per cent, within four years. The pnrch.isiug power 
 of silver in countries where that metal is the measure has not materially declined 
 excepting with respect to gold. This phenomenon, if we put it into a few words, 
 is this, that gold has risen ao per cent, iu puichasing power, while silver has fallen 
 but Lttle, if any. 
 
 [From The Public, August 10, 1876.]j 
 
 Has silver fallen in value 1 Thousands assert it. Not a man has sabmitted a 
 single proof. * * « Every intelligent man understands that if silver sold iu 
 1872 at si.Kty pence per ounce in gold, and sells now at tifty-one pence, that change 
 may have been produced either by a decrea.se of 15 per ceut. in the value ot silver, or 
 by a corresponding rise in the value of gold. * * * Gold will buy more of silver 
 and more of everything else than it would in 1873. The decline in silver from fifty- 
 nine and a quarter pence in 1873 to fifty-one pence in 1876 has been 14 per ceut. As 
 we have repeatedly sliown, the decliuein the price of other commodities generally 
 ha.s been about as much iu other countries in which gold is the standard, and con- 
 siderably more in this country, where prices have been in part by a depreciated 
 currency. On the other haiul. tliere is no proof that prices of comiuodities gener- 
 ally have changed appreciably in tho.se countries where silver is the measni-e of 
 value. Gold is relatively scarce and de.ar. Prices fall, industries are prostrated. 
 Silver al.so falls in countries which have driven it from use as a mea.snre of values, 
 and deprived themselves of the protection which that use would give iu such a 
 strait. 
 
 [From The Public, September 28, 1876.1 
 
 In point of fact there is a ''corner " in gold. Its price iu silver and its purchas- 
 ing power rise rapidly in the western world. 
 
 And yet to-day, when the corner iu gold is a closer one than in 1876, 
 The Public echoes and re-echoes what is with a few honorable excep- 
 tions the voice of the New York press, th.it all debts, public and pri- 
 vate, shall be paid in the cornered metal in unblushing detiance of 
 both the letter and spirit of contracts. 
 
 It has been persistently urged that if silver has not yet depreciated, 
 its tendenci«s are in that direction, and that if we remonetize it, we
 
 16 
 
 shall be overwhelmed by the discarded, refuse stock of other nations, 
 and that this country will be cursed with a fluctuating, depreciated, 
 unreliable, and worthless money. 
 
 Look to whatever quarter we may for the source of this threatened 
 flood, it cannot be found. France has none to spare. The $300,000,000 
 of silver which she has is all urgently needed as a basis for her paper 
 issues. She can only discard it by supplying its place with gold. If 
 she enters upon that experiment now, or in the near future, it would 
 postpone indefinitely any attempt at gold resumption in this country. 
 Our legislation must therefore be based on the idea that France must 
 continue her present money system indefinitely. Reliable informa- 
 tion from Germany shows that the disposable stock in that country 
 does not now exceed $70,000,000, and the London Economist estimates 
 it to be considerably less. This amount might be emptied into th^^ee 
 or four of the Western States without producing a flutter in the 
 financial atmosphere. England has not now and never keeps any con- 
 siderable stock of silver on hand, but is constantly obliged, in order 
 to meet the demands of her commerce with India, to telegraph orders 
 for silver on San Francisco. 
 
 There are no disposable stocks elsewhere either in Europe or Amer- 
 ica, and silver never returns from the eastern world. 
 
 Whenever the prediction has been made that the markets were to 
 be flooded with any other articles than silver, such as cotton or wheat, 
 it has generally been deemed necessary, if the object was to aft'ect the 
 prices, production, or use of those articles,to point out specifically from 
 what quarter of the globe the flood might be expected. 
 
 But in respect to silver, there has been a beating of gongs and a 
 universal shont of warning to the people to maintain legislative 
 dikes against the incoming floods of that metal, whose sources they 
 have been unable or unwilling to point out. This Chinese system of 
 warfare against silver has proved ineffectual, because upon examina- 
 tion the masses of the people could not see that any evil would result 
 to this country even if the entire stock of German and French silver 
 should be sent here. On the contrary, the people believe that a sil- 
 ver flood of only that magnitude could result in no injury whatever, 
 but would only serve to revive the stagnant industry and commerce 
 of the country, like rain upon the parched, thirsty, and sun-cracked 
 earth. 
 
 As no dangerous quantity of silver existed in known localities the 
 gold worshipers and bondholders have been obliged to cause it to 
 be invented or discovered, and in this, as might be expected, they 
 have not failed. The discovery was promptly made about a year ago 
 by a reliable newspaper correspondent in the distant and inaccessible 
 mountain ranges of Peru, which threatened, upon the completion of 
 nearly completed tunnels, to pour through them in a deluging stream 
 uncounted thousands of millions of that contaminated and contami- 
 nating metal. These fabulous deposits were wisely located in such 
 remote regions that it was safe to affirm almost anytliing in respect 
 to them, but thus far they have stubbornly refused to leave their 
 adamantine sepulchers. 
 
 The stories concerning them were regarded at the outset as absurd 
 by all who knew anything of the history of silver mining, and they 
 have since been revamped so often that they have ceased to attract 
 any attention. 
 
 The Comstock lode, confessedly one of the greatest mineral-bear- 
 ing veins ever discovered and in the hands of the most vigorous, 
 pushing, energetic, ingenious and euterprisiug people, has yielded
 
 17 
 
 less than !|!200,000,000 of silver since its discovm-y twenty years ago. 
 Daring that time exiiauHtive oxpiorations liave been made along ifc« 
 entire lengtli to a depth of two thousand feet. In view of faots like 
 these something more immediately threatening to tlie value of silver, 
 and more plansible than a deluge of that metal from the distant 
 mountains of Peru, was neeiled to frighten the people from restoring 
 their ancient money standard. 
 
 The fundholders of the world who deal in mortgages on past and 
 future enterprises instead of inaugurating them, and who are exclu- 
 sively engaged in the improvement of the value of debts, and never 
 in the improvement of the value of property, fertile in expedients, 
 have been equal to the occa-sion. They have developed a new and 
 imminent danger described in a startling and bewildering dispatch 
 of a recent date to their organs in New York, which I read : 
 
 Recent discoveries of chemists and metallurgists in the science of cnpellation 
 have been so important that some of them claim that they can even melt up sheet 
 lead and piping in ordinary n.se and extract a sufficient percentage of silver to 
 make the operation largely profitable, and anangements have alieady been made 
 to reopen the workings of many abandoned mines of poor ores under the now 
 eupellating processes ii the bill should pass. 
 
 The process of cupellatiou applied to lead, as here de.scribed, might 
 have been important in some remote ages of the world, but it is now 
 so dwarfed by improved and more scientific applications of that pro- 
 cess as to be of little consequence. 
 
 Cupellation applied to paper in 1869 extracted fifteen hundred 
 millions of coin out of paper-ciirrcucy bond.s, and a still later refine- 
 ment of the process seeks to transmute seventeen hundred milliona of 
 coin into gold. 
 
 The cupellators of 18G9 made a clear profit of $500,000,000 without 
 investing a single dollar in lead or in any metal or material or mine. 
 
 The ancient alchemists tried to transmute base metals into gold. The 
 capellators referred to in the dispatch I have read hope to extract 
 silver from lead. But by a practical application of their process the 
 cupellators of 1869 extracted more coin out of paper than was ever 
 yielded by the Comstock lode and Potosi combined. No talk about 
 a process of eupellating silver out of lead will divert the people 
 of the United States, who have suffered so deeply by the double 
 process of eupellating coin out of paper and gold out of coin, from 
 ascertaining the exact nature of the operation. It may be that when 
 its details are thoroughly understood the process may be reversed, 
 and made to work in the interest of the masses of the people. When 
 the exact nature and result of the process is exposed it will not be 
 surprising if the name of cupellator shall become as odious as that 
 of inflationist and repudiator. 
 
 I have so far considered the rise in the value of gold since 1872 as 
 demonstrated aud measured by the average fall in the prices of com- 
 modities. But the rise in its value, as shown by the fall in the prices 
 of land and labor, has been vastly greater and has contributed much 
 more powerfully to the business prostration everywhere prevailing. 
 Land and labor immeasurably overshadow in magnitude and impor- 
 tance the aggregate of mere merchandise that was ever in existence 
 at any given period. Land in all civilized countries is the great basis 
 and bulwark of credit, aud a geueral or considerable fall in its price 
 has never failed to be ruinous to every commercial and industrial 
 interest. It constitutes a great if not a major portion of the posses- 
 sions of mankind. Cities are built upon it, and all the dwellings and 
 structures of man. All the permanent works of utility for the amel-
 
 J8 
 
 ioration of tlie condition ot tlie race are constructed upon and become 
 a part of it. 
 
 From its generous breast all the wants of man must be supplied. 
 Land, together with all the permanent structures built upon it, con- 
 stitutes what in law is dignitied by the name of real estate. A gen- 
 eral fall in the prices of real estate would not seem to be possible 
 nnless caused by an absolute appreciation in the value of the medium 
 in which it is measured, except nnder the blows of great national 
 calamities, or except nnder the influence of one of those mysterious 
 cycles of national decadence which at long intervals in the past have 
 frowned darkly now upon one portion and again upon another of the 
 civilized world. 
 
 Adam Smith, if not the founder of the modern science of political 
 economy, was at least one of its greaitest exponents. In treating of 
 labor, he said: 
 
 Labor is the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities. 
 
 This view he maintained with the most conclusive arguments, and 
 the same view is maintained by all reputable economical writers 
 whose works are either read or remembered. 
 
 Testing the value of gold by these great measures, labor and real 
 estate, what results do we iind ? Details need nor. be given. I hazard 
 nothing in saying that under this crucial comparison it will be found 
 that gold has very nearly if not quite doubled in value within the last 
 five years. The most careless observer cannot fail to discover the gen- 
 eral correctness of this statement, and the most careful scrntiny in 
 every locality will confirm it. The universal experience of those who 
 have real estate or labor to dispose of will attest its truth. The reason 
 of this greater fall in the prices of land and labor than in commodities 
 in general use is not difficult to discover. 
 
 If the articles given in the tables of the New York Public, which 
 show an average fall in price of 19 per cent., are divided into two 
 groups, it will be found that the group consisting of breadstulfs, 
 butter, and cheese, provisions and tobacco, sugar and molasses, and 
 tea and coftee, all of them under the habits of the people of the 
 United States being articles of necessary consumption, fell in i^rice 
 only 13 per cent., while the other group, consisting of raw material 
 for manufacture, coal, iron, cotton, leather, and wool, fell in price 
 26 per cent. 
 
 The inevitable consequences of a rise in the value of money, or in 
 other words of generally falling prices, are stagnation of industry, 
 decreased amount of employment, and shrunken wages. The luxu- 
 ries of the rich find the comforts of the middle classes are at such 
 times largely curtailed and in many instances cut otF altogether, but 
 the wage classes, even when they earn more than the needs of sub- 
 sistence, rarely indulge in superfluities or extravagance in living. 
 For the purpose of getting ahead in the world they pinch and save and 
 live in the most frugal manner consistent with health and strength. 
 
 Hence during a period of falling prices the demand for the actual 
 necessaries is impaired the least, and the demand for things not in 
 exigent requisition is impaired the most. Changes in the prices of 
 necessaries and luxuries, respectively, must be in correspondence with 
 the changes in the demands for them. A constantly increasing pro- 
 portion of the aggregate earnings of labor and capital must be appro- 
 priated to the actual necessities of subsistence, and consequently 
 the fall in their prices will be the least. 
 
 The aggiegate of wages will be largely reduced because there will
 
 19 
 
 1)6 no incontivo to tho employment of labor l)e,voiul that docreaising 
 amount required to produce the necessaries of life and to produce also 
 such a sujijily of comforts and luxuries as will suffice for the few who 
 may still be able to indulge in them ; the profits of both these kinds of 
 production will be reduced to the lowest point consistent with their 
 being maintained at all. It is easy to perceive that a long-continued 
 rise iu tho value of money and fall in general prices would destroy all 
 credit, and that the resulting sufferings of the people would finally 
 drive them to seek relief in a direct exchange of commodities. The 
 price of the raw material which enters into all kinds of nuuiufacture 
 falls in a greater ratio than do the necessaries of life, because the 
 manufactured article can be dispensed with, while the coarse food 
 essential to the existence of the laborer fs indispensable. 
 
 The tables of The Public do not give the prices of luxuries at dif- 
 ferent periods, nor have I been able to find them elsewhere in reliable 
 form. Nor do I deem it necessary to furnish them in order to illus- 
 trate what is so familiar. The fall of prices is, of course, greatest in 
 those articles for which there is the greatest decrease in the demands, 
 and all experience shows that the depressing effect upon the prices of 
 property of an increasing value in money falls first in point of time 
 and greatest in degree on luxuries. 
 
 Tho wage classes lose half their accustomed earnings through a re- 
 duction of their wages, and more esx>ecially through unsteady em- 
 ployment and lack of employment altogether. This is not compen- 
 sated by a corresponding fall in the prices of what feeds them. On 
 the other hand such consumers of luxuries as are still able to com- 
 mand them find a large ofl'set to the diminution of their incomes iu 
 the very great fall in the prices of what they buy. 
 
 These obvious principles furnish an easy explanation of the present 
 depressed condition of labor and real estate. Very little is being 
 ]>roduced, especially in mannfacturing industry, except what is ui'- 
 gently needed, and therefore sure of a market. As production declines 
 wagesdecline, and, what is even more disastrous, employment becomes 
 intermittent and precarious. The aggregate of a laborer's annual 
 earnings depends quite as much iipon the constancy of his employ- 
 ment — the number of days in the year that he can get employment — 
 as upon the rate of his wages when he is fortunate enough to find 
 work to do. 
 
 In respect to real estate, nothing is salable except what is actually 
 and immediately wanted. Houses to the extent that occupants are 
 ready to pay rent for them, and stores and warehouses within the 
 limits of the restricted and still diminishing demand, will command 
 a price, although a low one. But with the spirit of enterprise crushed 
 out as it is now, by the striking down at a blow of one-half of the 
 metallic currency of the world, by the absolute shrinkage in this 
 country of accepted paper currencies, and by the still greater shrink- 
 age of such currencies relatively to advancing population and com- 
 merce, property having merely prospective value has ceased to be re- 
 garded as property at all. It is wholly unavailable, and when forced 
 to the auction-block sells for little more than the value of the paper 
 on which conveyances of it are written. Unimproved lots in growing 
 cities, undeveloped mines and water-powers, buildings for the mo- 
 ment unoccupied, agricultural lands beyond the immediate demand, 
 are all in this category. Unless under exceptionable conditions, they 
 are entirely unavailable as security for loans. 
 
 Money is the oxygen of exchange, and when through a decrease in 
 quantity it is rising in value, commerce and industry become asphyx-
 
 20 
 
 iated. The business of the world is now writhing and stifling under 
 the exhausted receiver of a standard shrinking and shrunken to the 
 constantly appreciating metal gold alone. 
 
 Savings-banks, trust companies, and insurance companies are 
 tumbling into ruin every day in all parts of the country. In the 
 great miijority of cases the real-estate securities, now tiinking in 
 value on their hands, were judiciously selected. Their mortgages 
 are weak, not because they were dishonestly or unwisely taken, but 
 because prices have been struck down by legislation impossible to 
 have been foreseen and guarded against. The condition existing 
 everywhere is faithfully described in the following language of the 
 bank and insurance commissioner of Maine. Reporting January 2, 
 1878, upon a large savings-bank in Bangor, which was being pressed 
 by its depositors, he said : 
 
 Depositors mnst be aware that a forced sale of the assets, especiallv real estate, 
 at this time, when depression rests so heavily upon this class of property, would 
 result injuriously to their interest and induce additional and needless loss. Ko 
 one can place his real estate upon the market at the piesent and get much above 
 one-half of its actual value. 
 
 Mr. A. J. Warner, of Ohio, in a collection of able essays lately pub- 
 lished, predicts that if the gold policy is persisted in prices of prop- 
 erty will fall to one-third of the valuation of 1874, and in reference 
 to present prices adds: 
 
 No small parti of the property of the country has already fallen to that level, and 
 notably tools and machinery designed for reproduction. 
 
 The fall in real estate is hardly greater in cities where it has been 
 the subject of speculation, or in the newer and more heavily indebted 
 sections of the country, than it is in the most staid and wealthy 
 regions. For example, the blue-grass regions in Kentucky, where 
 speculation in lands and mortgages upon lands are least known, have 
 not escaped the general collapse. A recent number of the Lexington 
 (Kentucky) Press says, that at no time in twenty-five years has land 
 in that section been so low, and that farms heretofore selling at from 
 $100 to $150 per acre, will not now command more than from $60 to 
 
 From every city in the Union, from Galveston to Bangor and from 
 New York to San Francisco, we have but one report. Of San Fran- 
 cisco, where business has always been done on a coin basis, I can speak 
 from personal knowledge. Outside property in all the cities has 
 ceased to be a basis of credit, while inside property is dull of sale and 
 has very largely decreased in price. 
 
 The columns of the local newspapers are filled with notices of fore- 
 closures of mortgages and of sheriffs' sales. More property is being 
 sacrificed for taxes than was ever before known in the history of this 
 country. 
 
 The fall that has taken place in the price of real estate under the 
 menace and aj)proach of gold payments is not confined to the United 
 States. 
 
 Wherever the gold standard has been or is being established, a 
 similar depression prevails. 
 
 In the Loudon Economist of December 22, 1S77, its regular Vienna 
 correspondent, writing four days previously in respect to affairs in 
 Germany, says : 
 
 Not even the news from Plevna and Paris has produced the least improvement. 
 Tlie stagnation of business still continues. Landed property is beginning to feei 
 the consequences of the crisis severely. It is said that in Berlin seventeen thou- 
 sand to eighteen thousand private apartments are lo be let. This statement may 
 be somewhat exaggerated. On the other hand, the Credit Fonoier banks are in a
 
 21 
 
 position of {rreat difticnlty. Thoir mortgacp debttirs are not a>»le to pay their intor- 
 «*»t, and whore the »ale. <iif their propeity takes place the produce or the sale often 
 realizeH less than the niortgage. 
 
 The Pomeranian Mortsa'^e Bank in Coslin has been oblij;ed to pnrchaae an estate 
 at the piii e of 300,000 niarks, moituaged t-o the aiiiount of l.i'iJO.UOO marks. Sev- 
 eral similar cases have occurred, and as tlie German niorti;age banks ha%-e about 
 tiOO,000,000 luaiks in circulation, a crisis is generally feared. 
 
 The fall in tlie wajjes of labor, measured in fjold, hsm extended to 
 every part of the -westem world and over all fields of industry. It 
 has been greatest, !is always at periods of stagnation, in the wages of 
 unskilled labor, but has been great in all employments. It is scarcely 
 an exaggeration to say that average wages, measured in gold, have 
 fallen one-half since 187*i-'73. It is certainly no exaggeration to say 
 that the receipts of the wage classes have diminished to a much 
 greater extent, if to the fall in wages are added the losses from en- 
 forced idleness. The particular class of employes on the Baltimore 
 and Ohio Kailroad who commenced the disturbances of last summer 
 did not complain so much of the reduction of their pay. They prob- 
 ably would not have risen in riotous assemblage if their employment 
 had been constant. The number of days in the month they were un- 
 employed was to them a much more grievous burden. This reduction 
 of employment is not coutined to railroads, but extends to every in- 
 dustrial department. 
 
 The most deplorable accounts of the condition of labor in England 
 and Germany reach us constantly. In Berlin revolutionary outbreaks 
 have been kept down only by the bayonet and the breecli-loader. 
 In England large groups of laborers are on the verge of starvation, 
 and that catastrophe has thus far been staved oti"only by straining the 
 resources of public and private charity to the utmost. 
 
 In this country the distress of labor, reaching a point never before 
 known, has culminated in mobs which have given ominous expression 
 to the des]tair of the people. The Army of the United States, never 
 before used for such a purpose, has been called upon within a twelve- 
 month to perform police duty, to preserve social order, and to protect 
 private property. The advocates of the gold policy, cousciousappar- 
 ently that it will make chronic this condition of things and perma- 
 nently demand the same remedy, have insisted that the numbers of 
 the Army should not only be ke]it up but enlarged, not to resist fvir- 
 eign enemies, guard forts, or enforce the laws of the United States, 
 but to repress the riotous uimsiug of a hungry, naked, freezing, and 
 frantic populace. 
 
 The New York Tribune of the7tli instant editorially says: 
 
 One of the most terribly significant incidents connected vrith the loss of the Me- 
 tropolis last week was the fact that one hour after the news that the ship bad gone 
 down arrived in Philadelphia with all the exaggerated horrors of a first dispatch, 
 the office of the Messrs. Collins was besieged with hundreds of hunger-bitten, de- 
 cent men, beggiag for the places of the drowned laborers. In this city there h.ave 
 been orer a thousand applicants at the agency for New Snnth Wales, to be sent out 
 as laborers and mechanics on the clipper ship starting this month for Sydney. 
 
 These people represent but a fraction of the great mass of unemployed poor in 
 the cities; men who are not paupers from inclination any more than the most re- 
 spectable reader of the Tribune : honest, industrious, frugal, in the ma.iority of 
 cases beads of families, who are out of work, and are ready to go to the other side 
 of the globe, or to the forests of Brazil, to get work to keep their wives and children 
 fi'om starving. It is useless to ignore this miserable, gaunt fact, which stares us 
 in the face at every corner. It Ls not to be dispelled any longer by soup-houses on 
 the one band, organized precautions asain-st tiamps on the other. "We have had 
 enough discussion on the relative advantages of occasional and organized charity. 
 It is not charity that is wanted ; it is work, and the only work which od'ers now as 
 a relief to the suffering in the cities is farming. How the unemploysd uiechanioa 
 and laborers have got through this; winter, God only know.s — they have been greatly 
 helped by the mild wt-atLer. But in three week's spring will" open, and what is
 
 22, 
 
 then to be done? TLe revival of business will be too slight to afford them any 
 tangible help. Arc they all t« sink down permanently into tramps and paupers! 
 Or, m case of a revival of the labor troubles of last July, are we to keep them as a 
 reserve corps, ready, as then, to join, with terrible efle'ct, the side of disorder, riot, 
 and rapine I 
 
 This simple description of the deplorable condition to which the 
 laboring populations of New York and Philadelphia have been reduced 
 has about it a touching jiathos which speaks straight to the heart, 
 and with a power all the greater that it is but too easily recognized as a 
 description of miseries everywhere prevailing. The woes and wretch- 
 edness of war have been often portrayed ; but have Senators consid- 
 ered that their sweep is far narrower than that of the calamities 
 which follow contraction and an appreciation in the value of money ? 
 The fiery pathway of revolution can be trod with less suifering than 
 the burning plowshare of falling prices, decaying industries, enforced 
 idleness, and destitution of laborers — conditions absolutely insepara- 
 ble from contraction. 
 
 The sacrifices of the people of this country in the civil war have been 
 the inspiration of eloquence since it closed, and will continue to be so 
 as long as there is a slave to be freed or an imperiled right to be main- 
 tained and wherever self-denial and heroism shall be considered hu- 
 man virtues. Five hundred thousand of our choicest youth returned 
 from it no more to wives, to mothers, and to children. Others 
 without number returned mangled and maimed. The substance of 
 the country was consumed in the support of armies, and jiroperty 
 was destroyed by millions upon the land and upon the sea. But the 
 exaltation of the heroic sentiment made it all endurable, and pride 
 mingled with and assuaged the grief with which the dead were 
 niourned. On the one side was attachment to the Union and the be- 
 lief that both liberty and country depended upon the struggle. On 
 the other side was an exaggerated and, as I think, misdirected but 
 none the less sincere attachment to local franchises and to long- 
 cherished political theories of State sovereignty. 
 
 But all the miseries and all the sacrifices of that war, incalculable 
 as they are, were small in comparison with the miseries and sacri- 
 fices inflicted upon the country since the war by the contraction of 
 the currency and its inevitable results, the increased pressure of debts 
 and the shrunken incomes of laborers. No exaltation of heroic senti- 
 ment and yn-ide aids in sustaining these later and greater sacrifices. 
 
 Those whose husbands, fathers, and sons sink in the struggle with 
 grim poverty or wander outcasts and tramps over the face of the 
 earth have the blow softened to them by no reflected luster of heroic 
 deeds. Those whose accumulations, large or small, are swept away 
 by mortgages insidiously swollen in magnitude by an appreciation 
 in the value of money, are not consoled by the proud thought that 
 their property has been a contribution to sustain the existence of the 
 Government or the liberties of the country, or that they have been 
 reduced to beggary in order that the nation might live. 
 
 Have Senators considered the true significance of a reduction of the 
 money incomes of the wage-earning classes by one-half ? Have they 
 sounded the depths ? Have they gauged the proportions oi a calamity 
 like that ? With all the mitigations of which it admits it is a pro- 
 tracted and corroding misery. The money cost of the things which 
 workmen buy may be reduced, but not at all in proportion to the re- 
 duction in their incomes. There is no reduction, however, i n individual 
 debts, nor in that enormous mass of public debts, national. State, 
 county, municipal, the burden of which rests largely upon the always
 
 23 
 
 overloadetl back of labor. When this Govcrnineut pledges its credit 
 the property in existence bears but a small part of the burden of its 
 redenii)tiou, compared with the portion which must be exacted from 
 the future earnings of the people. The iuterest on the mortgage is 
 paid not in money drawn from hoards, but from the annual produc- 
 tions of the country. . . , ^ i ■ ■> 
 Let prices range as they may, interest and principal must be paid 
 in the full number of dollars promised, without reference to their 
 value. The lower prices fall, tlie greater will be the proportion of 
 annual productious re([uired to make payment, and the less will be 
 the proportion which is left to reimburse capital and labor. In a di- 
 vision of losses between these it is always capital which escapes with 
 
 a minimum. . . j. j- 
 
 The annual interest on public debts in this country is not tar trom 
 0-200 000 000— a vast amount to be taken out of the current earnings of 
 the people. To double the weight of this obligation by doubling the 
 value of money, and reducing money wages one-half, is to render a 
 burden, already great, well-nigh insupportable. 
 
 It is a comparatively small portion of the people ot tins or any 
 other country that obtain the gold and silver with which debts must 
 be paid by delving in the mines. The vast majority work for gold 
 and silver, not in the mineral regions but in the rice, tobacco, wheat, 
 and corn fields; at the anvil, forge, and lathe; in the seams of coal 
 and iron : and in ships on the seas. The debt-paying power of the 
 country is measured bv the amounts of gold and silver for which the 
 products of these and all otlier industries can be exchanged. 1 his 
 gau'^e measures the value of money. These scales weigh the burden 
 of cfebt. It is only because the money function has been conferred 
 on o-old and silver,'and that debts are expressed and solvable in them, 
 that it becomes so transcendently important that their i)r(>ductiou 
 should increase with the increasing population and money demands 
 of the world. , . , , ., 
 
 It is because of this, that any eflfort to deprive gold or silver or 
 any portion of either, of the debt-paying function, without fur- 
 nishing something to take its place, is treason to the human race. 
 Measured against the consequences of that treason, the disappoint- 
 ment of what are called, whether in grim joke or not I am unable to 
 say, "the honest expectations of creditors," pubhc or private, sinks 
 into utter nothingness. As commodities, whether in production, use, 
 or amount of existing stocks, gold and silver are utterly insignificant 
 factors in the world's economy— the least useful and necessary of all 
 the metals. Stripped of the money function vested in them by legisla- 
 tion, there are probably no two commodities whose entire destruction 
 would interfere less with the happiness of the human race. How com- 
 paratively insignificant the labor employed in their production ls 
 will ai»pear from a single reflection. The aggregate annual produc- 
 tion of both metals does not exceed 1200,000,000, while the annual 
 productions of this couutrv alone, as measured in them, amounts to 
 thousands of millions of dollars, and of the whole world to a sum 
 too vast to be appreciated. In view of these facts it needs no close 
 calculation to reveal the enormity of the crime of striking down any 
 portion of the money metals upon whose volume depends the debt- 
 payin"' canacitv of individuals as well as of nations. If the money 
 of this country "be computed at 3700,000,000. an addition of 10 per cent, 
 to its value would be a gratuity of $70,000,000 to the possessors of 
 mouey, and a gratuity of 10 per cent, to the creditors of the country 
 on all'<lebts due them. On the other hand, the property of the
 
 24 
 
 country, which is estimated at $40,000,000,000, would be valued at 
 $4,000,000,000 less than before ; and to that extent the credit of its 
 owners and their ability to pay debts would be curtailed, to say noth- 
 ing of its paralyzing effect upon industry and commerce. 
 
 This is a direct premium to those who are engaged in swapping dol- 
 lars and a ruinous tax upon those wlio are engaged in earning them. 
 The ettect of a diminution of the value of the metallic mouey of the 
 world by striking down any portion of it may be illustrated by the 
 dealings in the stock of an incorporated company, as (say) Pacitic 
 Mail Company, whose capital stock is represented by two hundred 
 thousand shares. Suppose that sales to deliver to a very large 
 amount had been made on this basis, wouAd it not be considered a 
 bald robbery on tlie part of those who held the agreements for the 
 delivery of the stock to procure the passage of laws to reduce the 
 number of the shares by one-half, or by any other amount, without a 
 corresponding reduction of the number of shares to be delivered ? 
 Would not those who had made promises to deliver shares be justified 
 in renouncing and repudiating their contracts, unless such corre- 
 sponding reduction were made? 
 
 There can be but one answer to this. Is a similar juggle with money 
 any the less a robbery ? It cannot be controverted that whoever 
 is in debt has, in the language of the stock exchange, sold money 
 " short." In the first supposed case parties had agreed to deliver iii 
 the future that of which they were not then in possession, to wit, 
 shares of stock. In the second case they have agreed to deliver in 
 the future that of which they are not in present possession, to wit, 
 money. The distinction between the two cases is in the thing to be 
 delivered, and not in the underlying principle. If half the money 
 upon which the promisors have recourse for the fulfillment of theiV 
 obligations were stricken down by legislation, would it contain less 
 of the ingredients of rascality than in the other case ? And if the 
 sufferers should make vigorous efforts to resist the operations would 
 they merit the epithets of lunatics, swindlers, and repudiators ? 
 
 Would not the epithet of swindler be more justly apjilicable to the 
 other party * 
 
 The one of the Comstock lode yields in value about one half gold 
 and one-half silver. If some evil spirit could by magic and incan- 
 tation eliminate either all the gold or all the silver, the miner would 
 have to extract and reduce double the quantity of ore in order to ob- 
 tain the same results as before. It may not be so obvious, but it is 
 just as certainly true that if by charms and wiles silver should be 
 eliminated from the money metals of the world, one-half of the money 
 profits and debt-paying capacity of every species of industry would 
 be destroyed. 
 
 The case briefly summed up shows that while silver has fallen 
 since lb72-'73, about 10 per cent, as measured in gold, commercial 
 commodities measured in the same way have fallen twice 10 per cent. ; 
 and that wages and real estate have fallen perhaps one-half in all 
 countries which use the gold standard, or in which paper currencies 
 are referred to gold and regulated by it. In other words the pur- 
 chasing power of silver although imj^aired by demonetization has 
 risen 10 per cent, in relation to commodities and 90 per cent, in rela- 
 tion to land and labor. There is not a town or city in Europe or 
 America where a given number of Mexican silver dollars, or of United 
 States silver dollars, if their coinage were permitted, would not to- 
 day buy more houses, more stores, more of general commodities, and 
 more labor than they would have bought in 1^72-73.
 
 25 
 
 In 1872-'73 silver aii>l g'>iu j-nces in llu; v\.',stf,rn wc>rld ^\^'.^e iden- 
 tical. Now silver prices are ascertained by addiiij^ 10 p<T cent, to 
 current f?old prices. Makinj^ this simple calculation we find tbat 
 in purchasing tlie entire ni:i:ss of articles exported from Kn;^land 
 £18,3d.5,000 in silver wonld <!;o as far in 1577 as £21.:ir.5,00U of the 
 same metal in 1872. We lind tiiat .975.90 in silver would buy asnnich 
 at wholesale of the leading articles of commerce in the city of New 
 York, May 1, 1876, as S85 in silver would buy May 1, 1872. We find 
 That an average ton of iron and steel of all kinds, raw and manufact- 
 ured, which in 1672-'73, would command in England $(J1.)^4 in silver 
 will now command only .$4ti.57 ; and that a ton of coal whi( h would 
 then counnand iji.').0.') in silver will now command onlj' S2.fc0. We 
 also find that in reference to a large group of commodities, selected 
 by the London Economist, the purchasing power of silver rose 23 per 
 cent, in London during the four years ending in December, 1877. 
 
 By what facts and arguments, then, is it proven that silver has 
 depreciated except in relation to gold i? Is not its command over the 
 entire range of the objects of liuman desire greater than it was five 
 years ago? Will it not in all markets of Europe and America 
 exchange ff>r more and better food, shelter, and clotliing, and for uioi-e 
 comforts and luxuries generally than it would five years ago f Mast 
 not greater sacrifices in sweat and toil and property be made to obtain 
 412^ gi-aius of standard silver now than were required to obtain eil hc-r 
 a gold or silver dollar when silver was demonetized ? 
 
 In the face of these patent and accumulated facts, it is still claimed 
 that silver has dejireciated to such a degree that it would be dis- 
 honest to pay debts in it, even if it would legally discharge them. 
 An eminent jurist once said of a certain legal proposition that he 
 could not conceive of a human mind so constituted as to entertain it. 
 I am equally incompetent to conceive of a human mind so constituted 
 as not to see that sih'er has appreciated rather than fallen in value, 
 and that gold has been so euormou.sly enhanced in value that to 
 gratuitously require debts to be paid in it is either the most gig;iutic 
 folly or the most gigantic fraud of all the ages. 
 
 Mr. President, in the remarks which I have had the honor of sub- 
 mitting to-day, I have endeavored to demonstrate that silver has not 
 depreciated in value since its demonetization, and that the general 
 reference to the silver dollar proposed in this bill as a dishonor'ng 
 medium of payment and as a depreciated coin, shows a strange mis- 
 apprehension of the facts or a sinister perversion of the truth. Before 
 taking my seat, however, I ask the forbearance of the Senate while I 
 make brief allusion to matter jiersonal to me and of special interest 
 to my State. 
 
 It is certainly not my wont nor agreeable to me to obtnide my pri- 
 vate affairs upon the attention of the Senate or the public ; but I am 
 advised by those whose judgment I hold in high esteem that it is my 
 duty to notice charges persistently and extensively made. It has 
 been widely iterated that I have special and individuiri interests to 
 be subserved by remonetizing silver, and that my advocacy of it is 
 influenced by sordid and igiwble motive. It is not needed to give my 
 constituents assurance that these charges are false. The people who 
 honor me with a seat in the Senate have universally treated such 
 charges with the derisive scorn that slander merits. And whatever 
 may be the conflict of opinion on the Pacific coast as to the wisdom 
 of ujy course, I am proud to say that I do not believe there is to be 
 found there a reputable man or woman of whatever shade of i)olitical 
 faith who would asperse me with dishonorable motive.
 
 26 
 
 I am not vaiu enough to suppose that anytbiiig relating tome could 
 be of the slightest public interest, except' in so far as it might affect 
 the character of this high body which it is the universal wish to see 
 maintained unsullied. 
 
 I have not been unobservant of the efforts to create a general pub- 
 lic impression that in advocating the rehabilitation of silver I am 
 controlled by unworthy and sinister motives. Nor am I insensible 
 to the labored endeavor to disparage my action by the repetition of 
 the statement that I am one of the owners of these fruitful proper- 
 ties known as the bonanza mines and that my personal gains would 
 be directly and immensely enhanced by the remonetization of silver. 
 To this I now proceed to make specific reply. I never had any con- 
 siderable interest in the bonanza mines, and the little interest I did 
 once have has long since been disposed of. The fact that I have not 
 had connection with productive silver mines since the silver question 
 was agitated other than occasional unimportant transactions in stocks 
 in San Francisco by my business agent on my account, so inconsider- 
 able that I did not keep informed of them, is well known to my con- 
 stituents and to all others who have knowledge of my affairs. I do 
 own stock in one of the very lai"ge number of non-paying mines on 
 the Comstock lode. This mine ceased to be productive more than 
 three years ago. A vast amount of money has been paid by its stock- 
 holders to carry on the extensive explorations continuously made since 
 that time. That it ever will again become a productive mine is a 
 ruatter of only distant hope. I have no investment in productive 
 silver mines, and my investments in non-productive silver mines are 
 much less extensive than in mines which produce gold exclusively. 
 Each and every statement to the contrary I declare here in this pres- 
 ence to be utterly and unqualifiedly untrue. I advocate the remone- 
 tization of silver because both justice and expediency demand it, and 
 because, even if it does not restore a full measure of prosperity, it 
 will check the rapidly spreading bankruiitcy and poverty which 
 threaten to overwhelm the country. 
 
 In the summer of 1876 a law was passed here to substitute $50,000,000 
 of subsidiary silver coins for the fractional paper currency. The direct 
 effect of that law was to make the Government a large purchaser of 
 silver bullion and consequently to maintain or advance its price. Had 
 I no other motive in advocating the restoration of silver than that its 
 value might be enhanced, I should certainly have supported that law. 
 I voted against it because I believed, as I then stated, that — 
 
 This sort of a scheme will in no wise relieve the wants of the country or remove 
 the pall of doubt and uncertainty which now hangs over it, and causes complete 
 stagnation and paralysis in every industrial department. 
 
 We have had within twelve months three several accounts from the 
 same newspaper press relative to the attitude of the principal owners 
 of the bonanza mines on the question of remonetizing silver. The 
 first, and this was the report longest persisted in, wa« that they were 
 in favor of it and, without specifically stating how, that they were 
 corruptly promoting it by every means in their power. Second, that 
 they were opposed to it. This second report hardly had time to be 
 echoed and re-echoed between New York and San Francisco before 
 the press in the first-named city revived the original account, and this 
 time with the addition that they had raised a fund of $500,000, to be 
 corruptly placed and corruptly used. 
 
 Althougli I am personally acquainted with the gentlemen referred 
 to and with all otliers on the Pacific coast who are largely interested 
 in productive silver mines, I have no knowledge other than such as
 
 U7 
 
 Komes to iiie tlironyh piiblii; ninior what their views and wishes on 
 the silver question really are. I have not at any time held communi- 
 cation with them, either collectively or individually, personally or 
 through correspondence or otherwise on this subject. 
 
 Of the four gentlemen composing what is known as the bonanza 
 firm, I believe, although I have no authority for stating it, that the 
 two who have personally devoted all the years of their manhood to 
 gold and silver mining are in favor of the reraonetization of silver. 
 They know l)y long practical experience the impossibility of flooding 
 the world with cheap silver. The other two who have always been 
 en«Taged in business pursuits in San Francisco and have never been 
 themselves practically engaged in mining, I believe to be opposed to 
 the reinonetization of silver. Whatever their views may be, I be- 
 lieve them to be honestly entertained. 
 
 The statement that $500,000 or any other sum has been contributed 
 by the bonanza owners or by anybody else to procure the renione- 
 tization of silver, is, in my belief, without foundation, and was so 
 known to be by those who uttered it. The charge that venal com- 
 binations have been formed and money raised for such purpose by 
 those interested in silver mining would imply idiocy on the part of 
 the mine-owners, if it be true, as is maintained by a majority ot 
 those who make the charge, that the remouetization of silver would 
 tend inevitably to depreciate its value. I know of no money raised 
 for such purpiise, and it is my unhesitating belief that none has been 
 furnished or attempted to be furnished for such purpose. I know 
 that the State whi(!h I have the honor to represent in part upon this 
 floor is too patriotic and high spirited to support any measure, how- 
 ever advantageous to itself, which would be prejudicial to the gen- 
 eral interests, or to indorse its representatives in doing so. 
 
 But denying asldothatlam personally interested in the remoueti- 
 zation of silver, I wish to have it distinctly uuderstood that I do not 
 even by implication admit that my right to legislate on the subject 
 would be lost or in any way impaired if the reverse were true. A fas- 
 tidiousness of this delicate order would be more nice than wise. It has 
 never been required of anyone here except the alleged owners of silver 
 mines. Has it ever been regarded as dishonorable for legislators, who 
 may have personal interests in iron, copper, lead, and salt mines, in 
 cotton factories, or in any other manufacturing industry, or in wool- 
 growing, to vote for or against tarifis and other laws directly aflect- 
 ino- those interests ? Has this gauzy virtue restrained owners of stock 
 in national banks from voting in controlling numbers for laws directly 
 benefiting those institutions i? Has the metropolitan press demanded 
 that persons so interested should abstain from voting here on such 
 questions ? If such a rule were insisted upon might it not leave one 
 or both branches of Congress without a quorum ? ISlight not the strict 
 enforcement of t-ut h a rule render necessary the creation of an idle 
 and i)rivileged class to legislate for the country ? 
 
 The silver miners of the United States have shirked no duty either 
 in peace or war. They demand neither protective legislation nor ex- 
 emptions from their full share in the burden of taxes, nor special privi- 
 leges of any kind; but they have special interests in the production 
 of'silver, and it is a task equally easy and grateful to me to vindicate 
 them. Thev are engaged in a lawful and honest industry, and who 
 between the two oceans are better entitled to fair treatment than 
 
 they? 
 
 The people of Nevada do not shrink from any comparisons to 
 which they can be subjected. It was because they were known to be
 
 - 28 
 
 loyal aud patriotic that Nevada was admitted as a State into the 
 Union. It was admitted during the crisis of the civil war, as an added 
 bulwark to the defense and liberty of the country. If their numbers 
 were and are few they have maintained good government, efficiently 
 protected life and property, liberally endowed institutions of educa- 
 tion and beneficence, and have so well ordered their finances that 
 their governor has been recently urged to convene the Legislature in 
 extra session to reduce taxes in order to prevent the accumulation of 
 an inconvenient surplus in the treasury. 
 
 I am ready to meet here and everywhere any comparison between 
 fehe vague, shadowy, and unsubstantial after-born expectations and 
 understandings of the holders of bonds promising coin that they 
 shall be paid in gold as against the equitable and lawful claim of 
 my constituents that (me of the money metals of the Constitution 
 shall not be stricken down after they have crossed a continent to ex- 
 plore for it and devoted their lives and fortunes to its development 
 aud production. I confront the charge that they seek an unjust addi- 
 tion of 10 per cent, to the value of silver by its remonetization with 
 the demand that the robbery of 10 per cent, of their just earnings by 
 its demonetization shall no longer be persisted in. When they em- 
 barked in the business of silver mining they had evei-y right to ex- 
 pect and understand that it would continue to be money, as it had 
 always been as far back as history or tradition goes. They had no 
 reason to believe that it would be denied the money function to which 
 it had been consecrated by the unwritten law of all the ages, and to 
 which it was dedicated by the Constitution of the United States. 
 
 Have the recently formed expectations of bondholders to be paid in 
 gold any foundation either in equity or antiquity comparable to the 
 right of the miner of the Pacific coast to expect that silver would 
 continue to enjoy its ancient franchise of coinage? 
 
 The bondholders have invested their money upon a contract em- 
 bodied in a law, which was constructive notice to them of its terms. 
 Direct notice was also given them by the law itself being referred to 
 on the face of each bond, together with the terms on which they are 
 by that law made payable. The bondholders' right to a faithful per- 
 formance of this contract is as earnestly insisted npon by the advo- 
 cates of this bill as by its opponents. The miners have not only in- 
 vested their money, but have risked health aud life upon the faith of 
 then existing law, which was a solemn pledge to them that the pre- 
 cious nietals were both to continue to be used as money. The bond- 
 holder asks that laws shall be continued in force which were enacted 
 after his contract was made, aud which changed its terms to his ad- 
 vantage and to the disadvantage of the nation, and especially of the 
 silver miner, whose industry it threatens to destroy. The miner asks 
 that the Constitution shall be observed, and that the law under which 
 his industry was organized and upon which it was founded shall be 
 restored. These two demands are incompatible with each other. To 
 the impartial judgment of the American people the miner submits 
 their comparative equity. The prizes in mining are few, the failures 
 many, but there is always hope enough to inspire continued effort ; 
 there is always doubt enough to check undue expansion. A compar- 
 atively small number have reached the plane of success, while many 
 have fainted and fallen by the way. Shall those who are now hope- 
 fully toiling be punished for the successes of the few ? No braver or 
 hardier men ever courted fortune by the straightforward road of toil, 
 faacritice, and iirivatioii. 
 
 President Lincoln, in one of his messages to Congress, declared them
 
 29 
 
 worthy not merely of the ordinary protection of law and juotice, but 
 of " extraordinary " measures of encouragement. 
 
 The miuint-; regions of this country frown witli the most forbidding 
 aspects of nature. In his restless wanderings in search of the precious 
 metals the miner sees no stately forests, no smiling lawns nor lus- 
 cious fruits to enchant the senses or soothe the mind; but it is iu torrid 
 valleys and on bare, bleak, and trackless mountains that gold and 
 silver are sought and only occasionally found. In this search the 
 miner leaves behind him every luxury of life, every convenience of 
 comfort, and every necessity of growth. _ 
 
 The metal which the silver miner seeks to obtain is not as is usual 
 in gold mining gathered from alluvial sands by unskilled toil ; it cau 
 only be wrenched from its embraces of adamant by exhausting labor. 
 It can only be separated from its baser surroundings by expensive 
 machiuerv'and the efforts of patient science. No dollar of gold or 
 silver obtained by mining has ever involved the robbing of one man 
 by another, but lias been fairly won in a struggle between the ruile 
 forces of nature and the dauntless energy of man, and was an addi- 
 tion to the wealth of the human race. My constituents have rights 
 as sacred as those of the national creditor. It is my high duty and 
 privilege to defend them on this floor, and I shall make no apology 
 for the'ardor and persistency with which I discharge this duty and 
 exercise this privilege. 
 
 Does anybody doubt that the Senators from Massachusetts would 
 rise with indignation if anybody should stigmatize as blubber-gam- 
 blers, whalebone-speculators, and members of an " oil ring," the 
 bronzed whalemen of Nantucket and New Bedford who, when fortune 
 has favored, bring safely into port the wealth which they have not 
 obtained by wrecking railroads or by watering railroad stocks or by 
 puts and calls and short corners in stocks, but which they have created 
 by struggling with the cold, the darkness, the storms, and the crush- 
 h\<r ice-floes of Arctic seas. And why should I restrain my indigna- 
 tion when I hear the stigmatizing epithet of "bonanza swindlers" 
 applied to my constituents who are to-day toiling in gloomy passages 
 under exhausting heats, two thousand feet below the surface of the 
 earth, away fiom the cheering light of day, in an industry which is 
 believed to pay less profit upon the average than any other known 
 to man? I do not shrink from the comparison of the ways and 
 methods of the acquisitions of wealth iu the mining industry on the 
 Pacific coast with the ways and methods of its acquisition anywhere 
 on earth, and least of all with the ways and methods of Wall street, 
 where these attacks upon my constituents originate. 
 
 Leaving personal and local matters aside, I will conclude with a 
 brief reference to the frantic appeals that come to us from certain 
 quarters to rally to the rescue of the ancient honor of the Republic, 
 which it is declared is now held aloft by less than a dozen States in 
 the Union. It is said that this nation will lose the high position 
 which it has maintained for a hundred years in the family of nations 
 if the pending bill shall pass. It is said that even the discussion of 
 a measure to restore to the country the power to perform its contracts 
 in the terms in which they are written has to no inconsiderable 
 extent disparaged us in the eyes of the world. 
 
 Whence come the really dangerous assaults upon the good name of 
 the nation ? Is it not from certain members of Congress who de- 
 nounce this bill as a " pickpocket bill " and as a scheme to issue clipped 
 coins, forgetting that the clippings were stolen from the ])Ockets of 
 the people and are now found in the pockets of their creditors ? And
 
 30 
 
 is it uot from the leading metropolitan and eastern press, which de- 
 nounces the supporters of the bill as swindlers and repudiators, and 
 declares itself to have the honor of this nation in its special charge ? 
 By what title does any faction set itself up as being ^Jwr excellence the 
 guardians of the honor of the country? Sir, that honor can repose 
 nowhere so securely as in the keeping and hearts of the peox>le. 
 There is its shrine and there alone can it find protection. 
 
 In what manner and by what methods has the New York and east- 
 ern press sustained the honor of the nation of which it proclaims itself 
 the special guardian ? Only by libels upon the character and per- 
 sonal motives of every public man who cannot see the justice of 
 robbing the Government and people by enhancing the value of the 
 money in which debts are to be paid ; by open and shameless appeals 
 to the President to make a corrui)t use of his patronage, to influence 
 votes in Congress against the silver bill ; by the |jretension, as false 
 as it is humiliating, that Congress dares not resist the decrees of or- 
 ganized capital. 
 
 The New York Tribune of January 7, 1878, said: 
 
 The President knows that men can he held true to republican pledges as to finance 
 if they know that their truth will mean favor as to appointments. 
 
 Three days later the same paper said : 
 
 The capital of the country is organized at last and we shall see whether Uougresa 
 will dare to fly iu its face. 
 
 These newspapers claim to be read largely in Europe, and undoubt- 
 edly the newspapers of the commercial cities are the only American 
 newspapers read on the other side of the Atlantic. What impression 
 of our i^eople and our public affairs and public men is likely to pre- 
 vail in Europe, which sees only those American newspapers in which 
 the majority in Congress is daily denounced as made up of silver 
 swindlers, repudiators, or lunatics, and in which it is daily repre- 
 sented that Congress can be corrupted by the President's patronage 
 and intimidated by the threats of organized capital ? What better 
 than a roaring farce is it for the editors engaged in this work of 
 defamation to style themselves the peculiar cliampions of the honor 
 of the nation ? 
 
 The attempt to persuade the President to use his patronage as a 
 corrupting agency seeming to have failed and Congress by votes at 
 various times and iu decisive numbers having exhibited a determi- 
 nation to " fly in the face of the organized capital of the country," the 
 latest movement has been to defame those who could neither be pur- 
 chased nor intimidated. No longer invoking the President to buy 
 Senators, these gold organs charge that Senators have sought to sell 
 their votes, and they furnish us with lengthy homilies upon the decay- 
 , iug morality of this body. The same press that day after day has 
 declared that it was the most urgent duty of the Chief Magistrate to 
 trade patronage for votes in favor of what is called honest money 
 uow shed bitter tears over a story of their own invention, that mem- 
 bers of this body have been waiting, watching, hoping, and asking 
 o be bribed. The New York Times of the 12th instan t editorially says : 
 
 The United States Senate has sunk so far below the standard with which it was 
 ormerly associated that the propositions which we yest^irtay gave as in circula- 
 tion at Washington excite little or no surjirise. There are Seuatois who have so 
 little intelligence and pi iuciple that they do uot know their own minds in regard 
 to the silver question, oi' so little conscience that they are I'eady to vote for or 
 against the pending bill. They imagine that it is popular. Provided they receive 
 a, quid j)ro quo, howevei', they are wiling to ruu the risk of unpopularity. They 
 are ready, in short, to Htdl their votes to the President, and aid in defeating the 
 bill if he will only pay their price. It is hiited that bj' adopting this bribery plan
 
 31 
 
 tliePreHidwitmavnntoiilv.l.-fcat llio Hland liilllmt also may cstal.li.sh aniiC;»ble 
 rclatioiifi IxitwiM'ii hU aclmiiii«tratii)ii and Scnalor.s who aro^ at present miimcal. 
 The explanation does hut add to the dis^'iaco of those who ofl'er it. 
 
 It waa Joal) who said to Araasji : " Art thon in health, my Ijrother ?'' 
 ancl"Hoho8inotohim * * * in the tilth lib." The. journals from 
 which 1 hav«i quoted seom to liave been eqnully Holicitonscoucerninc 
 the national lionor, and while tenderly inquiring aa to ita health deal 
 deadly stabs like these. 
 
 How would British honor and credit stand in the world s estimation 
 if the London newspapers should combine to represent that the Brit- 
 ish Parlianieut dared not resist the dictation of organized capital ; that 
 the Crown could secure any legislation by gifts of coininissions to 
 offices, and that the members of the Lords and Connnous were wait- 
 ing and eager to be bribed ? How much of the British honor and 
 credit would be left if these same newspapers should represent that 
 the constituencies in a majority of the boroughs au<l shires of England 
 were as corrupt as their representatives, and were fully in accord with 
 them in the passage of laws designedly and wickedly framed to rob 
 creditors and violate national faith ? How much of British honor and 
 credit would be left if these same newspapers should urge the Crown 
 to bribe the Lords and Counuons with ])atronage, to pass laws or to 
 refuse to pass laws in order that that honor might be protected against 
 the knavish instincts and designs of the great mass of the citizens of 
 Great Britain. 
 
 But if the British Parliament should refuse to be bribed and, carry- 
 ing out the wishes of the peo])le, should enact the laws denounced as 
 being dishonest, and if the world should discern that the laws so 
 passed, insteadof violating contracts, promoted the f ul lillment of their 
 strict letter, would British honor then be tarnished ? Would it not 
 rather be the London press, that had vilitied its own people, which 
 would receive the brand of public reprobation? 
 
 In this country the national honor has never been tarnished and 
 never has been in danger of being tarnished by those who propose to 
 restore the ancient money in which every national bond is on its 
 face payable. If the credit of this country is in any danger, it la 
 from the charges of the opposing faction that a majority of the citi- 
 zens of a majority of the States of this Union are innately dishonest. 
 Let the gold press of this country not forget that while ])ower usu- 
 ally begets intolerance it always begets resistance. It is boastfully 
 declared that capital is now "organized at last, and that we shall see 
 whether Congress will dare to lly in its face." How long is it since 
 the slaveholders of this country, intoxicated l\y the long possession of 
 absolute sway, declared that cotton was king, and that grass should 
 grow on the streets of northern cities if its royal prerogatives were 
 interfered with ? The southern men who hear me know that it was the 
 arrogance begotten of irresponsible power, the dominating spirit en- 
 gendered by slavery, that provoked and precipitated the revolution by 
 which id was destroyed. Are the same people who carried that revo- 
 lution through lire and blood on the bayonets of three millions of men 
 likely to be patient under the taunt that their chosen representatives, 
 sitting here under the Dome of this Capitol, dare not ily in the face of 
 the organized money-lenders and bondh(jlders of tlie country ? Thank 
 God and the Declaration of Independence and the patient heroism that 
 made it a vitalizing loroeand the Constitution thatcrystallized it into 
 law, the ])eople of this country are furnished with a better method of 
 righting wrongs and asserting rights than a resort to arms; and with 
 noteless resolution and enthusiasm than wars against oppression 
 
 o
 
 This 1- ^o' 
 
 
 inspire will they in peaceful methods and under the forms of law 
 trample under foot any power that seeks through corruption or intim- 
 idation to intrench itself in this citadel of their liberties. They will 
 fiee to it that this remains a popular government in fact as well as in 
 name, and. despite the craft of the cunning and the wiles of the wicked 
 that their representatives in this Capitol register through constitu- 
 tional laws their imperial will. [Applause in the galleries and on 
 the iloor.] 
 
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