Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 43.djvu/603

Rh the United States; it makes highly probable the diminution or cessation of large silver purchases by the United States. The grounds of expediency against making silver the standard of value, or so legislating that it may possibly become the standard of value, have become stronger than ever.

What the price of silver will be in the future must depend on the volume of the annual production as compared with the occasion for its employment in the several ways just mentioned. The crucial question is that of production. During the last twenty years the world's production of silver has more than doubled. Geologists tell us that this great increase has been due to an extraordinary succession of lucky finds, not likely to be repeated; and they predicted, even before the collapse in the price due to the action of British India, that silver would be produced in smaller quantity in the future. Predictions on this subject, even from the most competent men of science, are to be accepted with caution, and it remains to be seen what the future will bring. Those old mines or newly discovered bonanzas which can produce silver at very low cost will continue to turn it out, even though a mixed feeling of panic and bluster may have caused them for the moment to stop operations. Mines which have been working at a moderate profit or none at all will one by one cease, now that the prospect of a rise or even maintenance of the price of silver has become so desperate. The gambling character of the business makes it difficult to use the reasoning which would apply to most industrial operations; but apparently we may look for some diminution of production. If this occurs, silver may maintain something like its present value, and the commercial relations between gold-using and silver-using parts of the world will gradually adapt themselves to the new basis. If production continues at anything like its present rate, still more if it augments, no one can tell what may happen to silver. Its price may fall indefinitely, and in the end it may disappear from monetary use as completely as copper has done. But a diminution of production and of the quantity of silver finding its way to the market seems the more probable outcome; and with this a price at a permanently lower level than ever in the history of the world until within the last twenty years. In either case silver ceases to be the basis on which the countries of advanced civilization rest their monetary systems: not so much from its physical unfitness, as from the increasing use of a more refined and highly developed medium of exchange, needing for its foundation a moderate supply of specie having a stable and uniform value.