Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 5.djvu/307

Rh more and more enthusiastic the more silver declined in the market and the more profit free coinage would have given him. The silver-mine owner is no doubt a great and good man, but he is not the most disinterested of philanthropists. He knows on which side his bread is buttered. Finding the act of 1873 in his way, he discovered that act to have been a heinous crime, not against the mining millionaires, but against the common people. Another class of persons joined in the cry, namely, those who had worked for an inflation of our irredeemable paper money, who had opposed the resumption of specie payments and now favored the silver dollar, because the silver in it was worth in the market less than a gold dollar, and its coinage would therefore furnish what they called “cheap money.” And then began that campaign of falsehood which in shamelessness of imposture has, within my knowledge, never had its equal.

Now mark what followed. Cowed by the uproarious outcry which was started by the silver miners and taken up by the “cheap money” men, Congress passed two laws, one in 1878, the other in 1890, in pursuance of which over 429,000,000 of silver dollars were added to our currency, more than fifty times as many dollars as had ever been coined before, besides a large addition to our subsidiary silver coins. Our paper money was largely increased, so that while in 1873, the year in which the American people were said to have been robbed of half their money—while in 1873, I say, we had $774,000,000 of money in the United States, we had $2,217,000,000 in 1895—nearly three times as much; and while in 1873 the circulation was $18.04 per capita, it was $22.96 per capita in 1895. Fifty times as many silver dollars, and many times more money of all kinds than this country had ever had in its most prosperous days—and yet, the price of silver in the market kept on falling, and the prices of