or seemed to serve, at the time very well for the movement of their persons and property. In 1834 came the first change, the great increase in transactions calling for a money having a higher relative value than silver. But the establishment of gold as the money of the country had no effect to bring it into use as the ordinary instrument of exchange. It had the effect, however, at the ratio at which it was coined, of driving silver, the undervalued metal, out of the country for the discharge of balances arising in foreign trade, and to such an extent as to be the source of great inconvenience, an evil remedied by the Act of 1853, whereby the minor coins of silver were so debased that they could be exported only at a loss. The purpose of the Act of 1873 was to give systematic or codified form to the numerous acts on the statute book, and a legal sanction to the disuse of the silver dollar which from the foundation of the Government had, as money, existed only in name. Never was there a public measure in the history of the nation more appropriate, more thoroughly considered, better understood, or more cordially accepted at the time of its enactment, than the Act of 1873.

REMONETIZATION OF SILVER.

By the Act of February 28, 1878, provision was made for the coinage of the silver dollar at the old ratio of 16 to 1, although at the time the commercial ratio between the two metals was about 18 to 1, the fall, from its greatly increased production, in the price of silver from 1873 having been about 12 per cent. The act, called the “Bland Act," from the name of the member of the House who had the measure chiefly in charge in that body, provided for the purchase at its commercial value for coinage by the Secretary of the Treasury of not less than 2,000,000, nor more than, 4,000,000 ounces per month of silver bullion, any gain or seigniorage arising to be conveyed into the Treasury, the coins to be legal tender at their nominal value for all debts, public and private. The act further provided that any holder of the dollars might deposit the same with the Treasurer, or any Assistant Treasurer, of the United States, in sums not less than ten dollars, and receive therefor "certificates " ceivable in the payment of all public dues. The bill first introduced into the House provided for the unlimited coinage of silver at the ratio of 16 to 1. It passed that body November 5, 1877, by a vote of 163 to 34. The bill was amended in the Senate, taking very

" re

nearly the form in which it finally became a law, passing that body by a vote of 48 to 21. As amended, it passed the House by a vote of 203 to 72. The bill was vetoed by the President, Mr. Hayes, for the following reasons:

If it is now proposed, for the purpose of taking advantage of the depreciation of silver in the payment of debts, to coin and make a legal tender a silver dollar of less commercial value than any dollar, whether of gold or paper, which is now lawful money in this country, such a measure, it will be hardly questioned, will, in the judgment of mankind, be an act of bad faith as to all debts heretofore contracted. The silver dollar should be made a legal tender only at its market value. The standard of value should not be changed without the consent of both parties to the contract. National promises should be kept with unflinching fidelity. There is no power to compel a nation to pay its just debts. Its credit depends on its honor. The nation owes what it has led or allowed its creditors to expect. I cannot approve a bill which, in my judgment, authorizes the violation of sacred obligations. The obligation of the public faith transcends all questions of profit or public advantage. Its unquestionable maintenance is the dictate as well of the highest expediency as of the most necessary duty, and should ever be carefully guarded by the Executive, by Congress, and by the people. It is my firm conviction that if the country is to be benefited by a silver coinage, it can be done only by the issue of silver dollars of full value which will defraud no man. A currency worth less than it purports to be worth will in the end defraud not only creditors, but all who are engaged in legitimate business, and none more surely than those who are dependent on their daily labor for their daily bread.

The bill passed the House over the veto by a vote of 196 to 63; and the Senate by a vote of 46 to 19.

In 1870, when proceedings for the demonetization of the silver dollar were first taken, its value compared with gold was 102.67 cents. In 1878, when it was remonetized at the old ratio of 16 to 1, its value had fallen to 89; the fall in value equalling 13.67 cents, the percentage of the fall being 15 per cent. After the fall had taken place the great crime of 1873 was for the first time discovered. To undo it was the purpose of the Bland Act. In the debates which took place a great many pictures of the fraud were drawn, one of the most graphic being that of Mr. Voorhees, then member of the House, subsequently a member of the Senate from the State of Indiana :

There is, he said, a numerous and powerful class in our midst who believe, as Alexander Hamilton declared, that the British Government, on this as well as on other points, is the best ever devised by the wisdom of man. Those enter

taining this opinion have thus far triumphed in the financial legislation of the United States, and the time has now arrived when their victories must be reversed or soon this Government will cease to be republican and the people no longer free.

Sir, this theme becomes humiliating to every honest American mind. It fills with shame every honest patriotic heart. The naked fact confronts us at every step that no pledge, however high, solemn, or binding in law and morals, has been strong enough to compel the authors of our financial legislation to obey it. No sense of national honor or good faith has restrained for a single moment the unbridled avarice of idle interest-bearing capital whenever it has been tempted, like some hungry marauding animal, to break over the barriers erected between it and new fields of spoliage that lie beyond. The silver dollar came to us with the birth of our Government. It was devised as a unit of value by Thomas Jefferson. It stood as honored as gold through every storm that beat upon this Government. It is associated with all our development, our strength, our growth, and our glory. With it as a currency, more than any other, the picket lines of civilization have pushed westward. The pioneer in the shadow of the great forests or on the wide prairies toiled to lay it by, one by one, until the coveted sum of one hundred lay before him. Then tightening the girths of his saddle, he rode with speed to the distant land office, where the Government took his one hundred silver dollars for eighty acres of land, which thenceforward became that most blessed spot on earth, a home; a home where trees were planted, where children were born and grew to be men and women, and they in turn went forth into the great world, still to the west, there to live over again in labor and privation the lives of the father and mother left behind.

The silver dollar is peculiarly the laboring man's dollar, as far as he may desrie specie. When specie payments were authorized before the war it was the favorite currency with the people. Throughout all the financial panics that have assailed this country no man has been bold enough to raise his hand to strike it down; no man has ever dared to whisper of a contemplated attack upon it; and when the hour of its danger and destruction drew nigh, when the 12th day of February, 1873, approached, the day of doom to the American dollar, the dollar of our fathers, how silent was the work of the enemy! Not a sound, not a word, no note of warning to the American people that their favorite coin was to be destroyed as money; that the greatest financial revolution of modern times was in contemplation and about to be accomplished against their highest and dearest rights! The tax-payers of the United States were no more notified or consulted on this momentous measure than the slaves on a Southern plantation before the war, when their master made up his mind to increase their task or to change them from a corn to a cotton field. Never since the foundation of the Government has a law of such vital and tremendous import, or indeed of any importance at all, crawled into our statute books so furtively and so noislessly as this. Its enactment there was as completely unknown to the people, and indeed to fourfifths of Congress itself, as the presence of a burglar in a house at midnight is to its sleeping inmates. This was rendered possible partly because the clandestine movement was so utterly unexpected, and partly from the nature of the bill in which it occurred.

Sir, in the entire catalogue of crimes against human society, not one can be found so awful in all its consequences, both immediate and remote, as a Government commits when it deliberately destroys the money of its own citizens. Wherever in all the regions of time such measures have been accomplished the horrors of history have taken place. No shrinkage in the amount of money, no contraction of the currency in the hands of the people was ever enforced by law to any considerable extent, except amid broken lives, ruined hopes, despair, lost honor, and all the vices springing from the lowest depths of poverty and human misery. The worst ingredients of war, pestilence, and famine all flow from the act of a government violently tearing from the hands of the laboring masses the money they so much need. Murder, theft, robbery, prostitution, forgery, embezzlement, and fraud of every hue and mien curse the land that is deprived of a full and sufficient circulating medium on which to give employment to its toiling men and women.

But what is the duty of the Government in this regard? Is it true that the people are not dependent on the policy of their Government for money on which to do business? Is it true, as often asserted, that in some way or other those who are willing to work, or have something to sell, can always obtain money regardless of all financial legislation? No greater fallacy than this was ever put forward in defence of wrong and injustice. Money is the creature of government both as to quality and quantity. It exists merely by the assertion of law, and in no other way. Article 1, Section 8, of the Constitution of the United States provides that "The Congress shall have power to coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin, and fix the standard of weights and measures," and Section 10 of the same article denies all such powers to the States, thus making Congress the exclusive creator of money for the American people. Without the action of Congress not one dollar can exist in the United States. If the article called money, whether of gold, silver, or paper, is necessary at all in the transactions of life, here alone is the fountain from which it emanates. How, then, shall this high power be exercised? Shall only enough lawful money be created, in proportion to the labor and other commodities which it is designed to pay for, to give ten cents a day to the laborer, and ten dollars for a horse; or shall it be furnished in sufficient amount to afford a just equivalent for labor and for every other thing of value? On the answer to this question has depended the prosperity or the adversity of the American people in all the past; on it their present deplorable condition can alone be explained, and their future fate foretold. A circulating medium being a recognized necessity of civilized nations, and its existence depending solely on national authority, that government which, for any reason, fails to make a supply adequate to the business prosperity of its citizens, violates that fundamental compact of duty which must prevail in every free political commonwealth.

Not only, however, has this Government failed in this great duty, but the manner it has adopted to furnish the people with their limited and insufficient supply of currency was conceived and perfected by the owners of retired inactive capital. The system of national banking now in use is the most elaborate and complete scheme for making the people pay tribute to wealth, in order to obtain a circulating medium, ever known in the financial history of the world. There is

not a dollar to-day in the hands of the people on which they have not paid a tax for the privilege of having it put in circulation by the Government. The national bank is the middle man between the Government and the people, and is enormously paid for what the Government ought directly to do itself. According to the report of the Comptroller of the Currency there were two thousand and eighty national banks Oct. 1, 1877, and they owned in even numbers $336,000,000 of government bonds as the basis of a bank note circulation of $291,000,000. The interest paid by the people on the bonds thus used to secure a currency on which to transact their business amounts to not less than $16,000,000 per annum. This is the tax paid for the bank-note circulation. The bondholder has been made the banker of the country, and he is banking on the interest-bearing debt of the people. For every $100 of currency they pay him nearly six dollars interest on the bonds which secure that hundred. His advantages, however, only begin with this bonus of sixteen millions.

The report of the Comptroller shows that, Oct. 1, 1877, the national banks had loans outstanding to the amount of eight hundred and ninety-one millions. No one will pretend that these loans are made on an average interest of less than ten per cent. This makes an interest amount of eighty-nine millions per annum, and this is an under rather than an over estimate. Of other bonds, stocks, debts, real estate, specie, currency, clearing-house exchanges, United States certificates of deposit, and all other sources, the property of the national banks, at the above date, amounted to something over five hundred and fourteen millions, which, at the rate of five per cent., makes an additional interest income of twenty-five millions. The following statement will therefore correctly represent the facts:

Oct. 1, 1887:

National banks

Resources

Interest on resources paid by the people per annum

2,080

$1,741,000,000 130,000,000

In return for the establishment of this stupendous money power it simply acts as an agent in transmitting the currency of the United States from the Treasury to the people. Will any one pretend that a cheaper and more equitable mode of supplying the country with a circulating medium cannot be framed by our legislative wisdom?

The power of money in the midst of times like these is very great, but I am much deceived in the people if they have not turned at last in defiance and bold warning upon their oppressors. They demand that certain specific wrongs shall be redressed.

First, those for whom I speak demand the restoration of the silver dollar exactly as it stood before it was touched by the act of February, 1873. They desire that it shall have unlimited coinage, not fearing that it will become too plenty for their wants; and that it be made a full legal tender, believing that it is as good now with which to pay all debts, public and private, as it was during eighty-one years of American history.

Second, they demand the repeal, unconditionally, of the act of Jan. 14, 1875, compelling a resumption of specie payments in January, 1879, holding that the