Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 43.djvu/597

Rh number of silver dollars—on the average, two and a half millions a month—and the expectation of the legislature was, at the beginning, that these bulky coins would find their way into circulation and use. In fact, but a very small proportion of them ever came into actual use. Notwithstanding every effort of the Treasury to get the coins into circulation, the community stubbornly refused to make use of more than a small proportion of them. Some sixty millions were got into circulation; but the remainder of the four hundred millions which were coined lie unused in the vaults of the Treasury, and when issued by it flow back with a regularity and persistence not unlike the operation of natural law.

But the experience of the United States under this same act of 1878 suggests a very easy mode of surmounting this difficulty and of securing the actual and effective use of silver in indefinite quantity. The printing press and the engraver's art have revolutionized the situation. The silver certificates, which now form the largest single constituent in our every-day money, were issued, at first sparingly, later more generously, to represent the coined dollars and to circulate in their place. They are printed in any desired denomination; they are easy to carry; they circulate more freely even than gold coin. It is curious that this simple device should not have been thought of at the outset, and should have been evolved only after an experience, running through several years, of the impossibility of securing the circulation of the actual coins. But the lesson has been learned, and in the schemes for the free and unlimited coinage of silver dollars it is now always proposed that the silver shall indeed be freely coined, but that its actual circulation shall take place through certificates representing the deposit of the coined metal in the Government's hands. By a machinery of this sort any durable commodity may indeed become the basis of the monetary circulation, and the crucial question becomes not one of the possibility of the use of a commodity, but one of its expediency.

This leads us to another phase of the question, the inquiry whether silver possesses that stability in value which is admitted on all hands to be essential for money. If the price of silver, like that of copper and iron, is subject to great and rapid variations from changes in the conditions of production, it is inexpedient, even though possible, to make it the basis of the circulating medium. If the great decline in the price of silver in the last twenty years is due to causes like those which have brought down the price of copper and the price of iron, we have strong ground for refusing to use it further, except for subsidiary purposes like those for which copper continues to be used. But here it may be answered, and certainly with much show of reason, that the decline in the price of silver has been due largely to legislation. The