Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/460

420 with constant improvement in processes for separating, the metal from its ores, silver in twenty years fell one half in value as compared with gold. The difficulty inherent in trying to keep two commodities at a fixed relation to each other—that is to say, the attempt to maintain an unchanged price for silver in terms of gold—plainly had passed beyond the utmost power of legislation. Nevertheless, at the instance of mine owners legislation in 1878 and 1890 was invoked against facts geological and chemical, with the result that the Federal Treasury bought a mass of silver to-day worth $234,000,000 less than it cost. The new plentifulness of silver has strengthened the preference for gold as the sole standard of value—a preference always felt by the richer among the nations from the great value which the yellow metal possesses in small bulk. And what if silver should become cheaper still? It is the fear that something short of 23·22 grains of gold will be paid by the borrower of a dollar that has tightened the purse-strings of capital just at the time when good faith toward creditors would have bred a confidence indispensable for an assured revival of business. Of equal moment with the agitation for the free coinage of silver as a source of financial misgiving, Mr. White stigmatizes the Legal-Tender Act. This Act has led the American people to believe that the Federal Government has only to set a printing press in motion to create money, as by Heavenly fiat. But the paper representatives of money inspire no confidence unless they stand for a commodity, gold, in the full measure to which at a time of panic that commodity will be demanded. What makes this matter of sound money of supreme importance is that on money as on a pivot turns so much more than itself—the whole fabric of manufacture, trade, and commerce. To tamper with the standard of value, to debase it, to lay undue burdens upon it, is as mad as the act of an engineer who skimps substance for his fly-wheel, scamps its workmanship, and who, defying the laws of poise and strain, brings a vast network of machinery to ruin.

Mr. White outlines the salient features of American banking, with its dreary record of overreaching, ignorance, and recklessness, relieved here and there by examples of sound principle and careful practice as in New York, Massachusetts, and Louisiana. He gives reasons for regarding Scotch banking as the best in the world, and points to Canada as successfully copying many of its methods. A great bank with many branches, on the Scotch plan, is a chain of lakes, each borrowing or lending with mutual benefit; the American method of isolation exposes every bank to alternate drought and flood. That it is no proper function of government to be a banker Mr. White abundantly proves. As the bonds upon which the existing national batik notes are based are disappearing, it is imperative that a new basis for this note issue be found. Mr. White presents the "Baltimore plan" and Secretary Carlisle's proposal, leaving the decision with those who must arrive at it.

Any one who wishes to know what can be said for the single-tax idea clearly and soberly, with the aid of statistics, and quite apart from any demagogic appeals to class prejudice, would do well to read Mr. Shearman's book in the Questions of the Day Series. The author starts with