Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 10.djvu/201

BLAND to invest here for fear that we will not pay in gold, yet these people are sustaining prices to-day and sending here all the money that they can spare. There was a panic in gold-using Australia that has bankrupted that whole people and sent terror to the banks over England. We know that gold can not be obtained there except by paying for it, yet it is coming here.

Talk about a premium on gold! Here is the Treasury of the United States that is open to the plunder of every speculator in the civilized world. He can take his Sherman note or his greenback or any other government currency there and get gold without cost. Did you ever notice the names of the gentlemen in New York who are shipping gold abroad, or bringing it back? Every one of those names that I have seen has a foreign termination; every one of those gentlemen, so far as I am advised, is an agent for or conducts a branch bank of some bank across the water.

If you go to the Bank of England to get gold for export you must pay a premium on it; if you go to the Bank of France to get gold for export you must pay a premium on it. The case is the same with every other banking house in Europe; no gold can be obtained there without paying a premium. But here is the Treasury of the United States professing to be so helpless that it can not prevent every gold speculator from robbing the government of its gold. Our Treasury will not pay out the silver which it might pay.