THE PAST AND FUTURE OF GOLD. 41 



object is to reverse the current of events and return to the practice 

 of the past, from which the nations have one by one unfortunately 

 departed. The " bimetallic standard " was in force in the United 

 States fifty years since so it is claimed although the actual 

 standard of the country after 1834 was gold, and less silver was 

 then coined in a year than has been issued of late years in a month 

 or even in a week, because the gold constituting a dollar could 

 be bought slightly cheaper than the silver in a silver dollar, and 

 therefore, though the coinage of silver was nominally " free," it 

 had really ceased to be " basic money " long before the " crime of 

 1873 " had been thought of.* If, now, the evidence shows that 

 the existing standard of value, or " basic money," has lost instead 

 of gained in value since the days of the " bimetallic standard " of 

 glorious memory, then the complaints and theories of the free- 

 silver men are without any solid foundation ; and the existing 

 agitation is like all agitations destitute of justice, simply a hin- 

 drance to the establishment of firm confidence and prosperity, 

 and, in short, an unmitigated nuisance with which no compromise 

 should be made. 



It is a singular fact that the method of showing that the gen- 

 eral level of prices has greatly fallen, and that therefore the gold 

 dollar has risen, is to take the statistics of prices in great centers 

 as a final basis. Wheat is cheaper in London in 1895 than it was 

 in 1845 much cheaper ; so is cotton, so is corn the three great 

 staples. Therefore, say our friends, gold has risen, and the debtor, 

 the farmer, and the producer are robbed ! This, with a little 

 bogy-talk about Shylocks, England, and Wall Street, is all there 

 is of their argument. 



Now, if we ask what the Ohio farmer received fifty years 

 ago for his wheat and corn, we come upon the fact which 

 must be a disagreeable one for the cheap- money men that he 

 did not get as much then as he does to-day. No books of sta- 

 tistics take any account of the prices obtained by the Ohio 

 farmer in 1845; and our statistical friends, overlooking (or "re- 

 membering to forget ") the difference in transportation and 

 other conditions then and now, conveniently assume that because 

 wheat was higher in London in 1845 than now, the Ohio farmer 

 must have been rolling in wealth. In the forties, the Ohio farmer 

 seldom got twenty cents a bushel for his corn, and frequently 

 burned it up ; and men still living can remember how, in those 



* This fact, which must be well known to men like Senators Teller, Jones, and 

 Stewart, renders it difficult to acquit the leading advocates of free coinage of deliberate 

 hypocrisy, when they so loudly declaim about " the crime of 18'73 " (which Senator 

 Stewart himself voted to enact), and the " dollar of our daddies," which was practically 

 non-existent. 



