Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 5.djvu/305

Rh gold and silver, which could not be so fixed as to keep the two metals together in circulation. First one of them would be driven out of the country and then the other. Meanwhile, over $1,000,000,000 of gold coin was coined, and since 1853 gold was substantially the only full legal-tender money in actual circulation. And those were exceptionally prosperous times. Then the civil war came and swept all our metallic money out of sight. Paper money took its place, and in that condition we were in 1873, when the famous act of 1873 was passed. What, then, was in reality that law that has since been so fiercely denounced as “the crime of 1873”? To judge by the declamations of the free-coinage orators, it must have been a law annihilating at one fell swoop one-half of the money circulating among the people. Did it do that? Why, it was simply an act revising our coinage laws and providing among other things that certain silver coins should be struck to be legal-tender in the payment of debts only to a small amount. The standard silver dollar, that had practically been out of use since President Jefferson in 1806 had stopped its coinage, was simply not mentioned in the enumeration. That is all. The act of 1873, therefore, did not create a new state of things, but simply recognized a state of things which had existed for many and many years. It did thereby not only not destroy half the money of the country, but not a single dollar of it.

But, I hear myself asked, if this is so, why was this act of 1873 passed secretly, surreptitiously, stealthily? For silver orators have been persistently dinning into the popular ear for many years, until millions believed it, the story that the silver dollar was “assassinated” through the law of 1873 by some dark, corrupt plot. This fable has been so often and so authoritatively disproved that I am unwilling to take it up again in detail. Senator Sherman did