OUR MONETARY EQUILIBRIUM 155 



about the year 1871 was due to uncontrollable commercial causes, 

 which the governments of Europe and America could not have 

 resisted even if they had tried. Gold had been the real standard of 

 value in the civilized world long before. As the metal most accept- 

 able and most convenient for the settlement of international balances, 

 it had become the cynosure of the trading community. Every 

 drawer and receiver of a bill of exchange had his mind fixed upon 

 gold when drawing or receiving it, even though the bill itself were 

 payable in silver. Hamilton observed this fact as existing in our 

 own country in the latter part of the eighteenth century. England 

 had been under the single gold standard twenty-four years before she 

 became conscious of the fact and gave legal sanction to it. Germany 

 was in the same situation long before 1871, although legally under 

 the single silver standard. Under such conditions it was inevitable 

 that whenever circumstances should impel the nations to overhaul 

 their monetary systems they should adopt the single gold standard, 

 thus making the law conform to the fact. Circumstances impelled 

 Germany to reform hers in 1871, and she took the inevitable step. 

 Her act was not the cause of the decline of silver in the early seven- 

 ties, but was rather the sign and symptom of a commercial move- 

 ment which was working with irresistible force in Germany and 

 everywhere, and had been signalized some years earlier by the Paris 

 Monetary Conference of 1867. 



But whatever may have been the causes of the phenomenon, it 

 took place in our own country at a most unfortunate time, in the 

 midst of a monetary and political crisis, when it could produce the 

 greatest confusion by freshly unsettling the public mind and break- 

 ing the peace that had been nearly won by the passage of the Specie 

 Resumption Act. 



Europe did not wholly escape this disturbance; but in Europe 

 the task of dealing with it was assigned to a small group of experts 

 in each country, the mass of the population taking no interest in it 

 even if they were aware that anything unusual had happened. The 

 same course of proceeding would have been followed here if circum- 

 stances had been the same. All of our previous coinage legislation, 

 from that of 1792 establishing the Mint to that of 1873 demonetizing 

 silver, had been the work in each instance of a few experts, the mass 

 of the people giving no thought to the matter. The same popular 

 apathy would have existed in 1876-1878 regarding the decline of silver 

 had not public feeling been already inflamed over the greenback 

 question. But for this special and temporary excitement we should 

 have contemplated the decline of silver in the same way that other 

 civilized countries did. We should have congratulated ourselves 

 that we had no stock of that metal on hand upon which a loss must 

 be incurred. We should have been thankful that the Demonetizing 



