Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 5.djvu/326

302 price for gold and silver by creating a demand greater than the supply.” And again: “When a mint price is thus established it regulates the bullion price, because any person desiring coin may have the bullion converted into coin at that price, and any person desiring bullion can secure it by melting that coin.”

What? Is this to mean that under free coinage the Government will purchase silver bullion and pay a certain fixed price for it? If so, then Mr. Bryan, the great free-coinage apostle, does not know what free coinage is. Let us remind him. It means that the owner of silver bullion may take it to the mint and have it coined and returned to him in coined pieces, so many silver dollars for so much weight of pure silver. It does not mean that the Government “stands ready to purchase the entire supply of silver at a certain price.” The Government does not purchase a single ounce of it. It merely receives the bullion, stamps it and returns it. And as to fixing a price, as soon as the Government stops holding up the silver dollar to the gold standard, as it would with Mr. Bryan's election, the silver dollar, measured by its purchasing power, will be worth not a cent more than the market value of the silver contained in it. If the market value of that quantity is 50 cents in gold, and you present at the mint 50 cents worth of bullion, you get back, not a gold dollar, but a silver dollar worth just 50 cents in gold. You might, instead of taking your bullion to the mint, sell it in the market for just the same amount of money. Indeed, bullion owners, unless they have some special reason for taking their bullion to the mint, will take it to the market and sell it there, as they very extensively do in all countries in which there is free silver coinage. Why should they not? Because if they have their bullion coined they get legal-tender dollars for it. If they sell it in the market they get there legal-tender