Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 5.djvu/332

308 higher; in 1864 wages had risen 25¾ per cent., and prices 90½; in 1865 wages had advanced 43 per cent., and prices 117 above what wages and prices had been in gold in 1861. In other words, the laboring man's wages had lost in purchasing power more than 30 cents in every dollar. Every country laboring under similar conditions tells the same story. What reason in the world is there to assume that this universal rule will not operate in the case of free coinage?

And what have the apostles of free silver coinage to say to this? Hear Mr. Bryan himself in his famous New York oration: “While a gold standard raises the purchasing power of the dollar, it also makes it more difficult to obtain possession of the dollar—employment is less permanent, loss of work more probable, and reëmployment less certain.” Is that all? Yes, all. Does not Mr. Bryan know that under what was practically the gold standard we had in the fifties one of the most active and prosperous periods this country had ever seen? Does he not know that more recently, at the time of the return to specie payments, we had under the gold standard years of signal prosperity with all hands at work? And does he wish to learn what has been the trouble since and what is the trouble now? Let him ask the employers of labor, and with almost one voice they will tell him that not the existing gold standard, but the growing danger of its overthrow, that the growing aggressiveness of the free-coinage movement, filling the minds of men with anxious apprehensions as to dark future uncertainties, has served to paralyze that spirit of enterprise which sets the laboring men to work. Let him study the history of the crisis of 1893. Not the gold standard, but distrust of silver, destroyed the confidence that employs labor. This is the truth, and Mr. Bryan will in vain try to deny it.

I must confess, of all the deceptive appeals resorted to