Page:The Republican Party (1920).djvu/108

 protective tariff, adjusted to circumstances and calculated at once to give reasonable protection to American labor and to prevent undue ex actions by monopolies or trusts. Both parties favored the Republican policy of a tariff commission to secure information and suggest to Congress a tariff schedule based on scientific principles. With these utterances the triumph of the Republican theory of tariff legislation may be regarded as complete.

Mention has already been made of the successful resistance of the Republican party to the various schemes for repudiating the fiscal good faith of the nation by paying the public debt in, irredeemable greenbacks and by flooding the country with “fiat money” created by the printing press. Its final fight on those lines was against an equally pernicious scheme for flooding the country with depreciated silver. In 1873, as related, Congress dropped the standard silver dollar from the list of coins therafterthereafter [sic] to be minted, and the next year limited to five dollars the legal tender power of silver coins of any denomination. At that time silver dollars had not been in circulation for more than thirty years. The legal ratio of value between silver and gold had been 16 to 1, and in 1873 the commercial ratio was 15.92 to 1, so that there was no inducement to silver owners to seek to have it coined. But then Germany demonetized silver and the commercial value of that metal began to fall until in 1876