Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/51

Rh object is to reverse the current of events and return to the practice of the past, from which the nations have one by one unfortunately departed. The "bimetallic standard" was in force in the United States fifty years since—so it is claimed—although the actual standard of the country after 1834 was gold, and less silver was then coined in a year than has been issued of late years in a month or even in a week, because the gold constituting a dollar could be bought slightly cheaper than the silver in a silver dollar, and therefore, though the coinage of silver was nominally "free," it had really ceased to be "basic money" long before the "crime of 1873" had been thought of. If, now, the evidence shows that the existing standard of value, or "basic money," has lost instead of gained in value since the days of the "bimetallic standard" of glorious memory, then the complaints and theories of the free-silver men are without any solid foundation; and the existing agitation is like all agitations destitute of justice, simply a hindrance to the establishment of firm confidence and prosperity, and, in short, an unmitigated nuisance with which no compromise should be made.

It is a singular fact that the method of showing that the general level of prices has greatly fallen, and that therefore the gold dollar has risen, is to take the statistics of prices in great centers as a final basis. Wheat is cheaper in London in 1895 than it was in 1845—much cheaper; so is cotton, so is corn—the three great staples. Therefore, say our friends, gold has risen, and the debtor, the farmer, and the producer are robbed! This, with a little bogy-talk about Shylocks, England, and Wall Street, is all there is of their argument.

Now, if we ask what the Ohio farmer received fifty years ago for his wheat and corn, we come upon the fact—which must be a disagreeable one for the cheap-money men—that he did not get as much then as he does to-day. No books of statistics take any account of the prices obtained by the Ohio farmer in 1845; and our statistical friends, overlooking (or "remembering to forget") the difference in transportation and other conditions then and now, conveniently assume that because wheat was higher in London in 1845 than now, the Ohio farmer must have been rolling in wealth. In the forties, the Ohio farmer seldom got twenty cents a bushel for his corn, and frequently burned it up; and men still living can remember how, in those