Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 5.djvu/306

282 that recently in a most conclusive manner. I will only add that I was a member of the Senate at the time and know whereof I affirm; and I emphatically pronounce all the stories about the act of 1873 being passed surreptitiously; about Senators and Members being somehow hypnotized, so that they did not know what they were doing; about some Englishman being on the ground with much money to promote the demonetization of silver, and so on, as wholly and unqualifiedly false. I wish to be scrupulously courteous to my opponents. But as a conscientious student of contemporaneous history, I am bound to say that in the forty years during which I have been an attentive observer of public affairs, I have never witnessed nor heard of such unscrupulous, shameless, persistent, audacious, cumulative, gigantic lying as has been and is now being done with regard to the act of 1873, its origin, its nature and its consequences.

How did it happen that the act of 1873 did not attract more popular attention at the time? Simply because the dropping of the obsolete silver dollar from the coinage was regarded by everybody taking an interest in such matters as the mere recording of an accomplished fact, as a matter of course, just as much so as a law would have been providing that the old flintlock should no longer be used in the army. And how did it happen that a few years afterward such an uproar arose about it? The reason for that, too, was very simple. In 1873 the market value of silver, although already yielding, was still high. The silver in the silver dollar was worth $1.02. The silver-mine owner did not care to take $1.02 to the mint and get only $1.00 back for it. He was then enthusiastic for gold. But a few years later silver had declined in market value considerably, and when the silver miner might have taken 90 cents worth of silver to the mint and got for it $1.00, he was enthusiastic for silver, and he grew