228 



CONGRESS. (SPECIAL SESSION THE SHERMAN ACT.) 



by one have these mediums of exchange been 

 discarded and a higher level reached. 



"The world has advanced step by step; and 

 the preference of the world to-day, from barbaric 

 Africa to highly civilized England or America, 

 is, between silver and gold, for the more pre- 

 cious of the two metals. When you gentlemen 

 begin to quarrel you must quarrel with the 

 forces of evolution ; do not quarrel with fifty 

 unknown men, whose names are not in any di- 

 rectory, who can not be identified, but who are 

 named en masse as being the men who are bring- 

 ing about all this panic. Let us be perfectly 

 fair with each other on this question. I do not 

 assert here that the Sherman purchase law is 

 the cause of all the woe from which this country 

 is suffering at this moment. No intelligent 

 man talking to intelligent men would undertake 

 to make an assertion of that kind. The Sher- 

 man silver law was not responsible for the fail- 

 ure of that Federal bank in Australia in January, 

 1893, nor for the tumble there of fourteen great 

 banks, nor for the rebounding force of the dis- 

 tress which has gone round the world since that 

 time like a bowlder bouncing down a mountain 

 side. 



" No ; the wave of distress has encircled the 

 globe. The Anglo-Saxon race has overdone the 

 business. It has gone on conquering and pop- 

 ulating the far-distant isles. In only one way 

 can we fix the responsibility for the primal mov- 

 ing causes of this distress upon this country 

 that is, we have been guilty of such legislation 

 here as turned from our shores the golden tide 

 of foreign capital and forced it to go seeking a 

 lodgment in bankrupt, insolvent, irresponsible, 

 and unprosperous countries. In 1878 we began 

 the series of errors, and we would have to-day 

 the same condition under similar circumstances 

 under the Bland- Allison act alone as we have 

 under the Bland- Allison act with the Sherman 

 act superimposed upon it. It is because we 

 have been trying to set ourselves against the 

 tide which is running around the world, the 

 tide that makes toward one single standard a 

 tide which it is as useless for us to try to turn 

 back as it was for old King Canute to attempt to 

 turn back the ocean breakers from the foot of 

 his throne when, seated on the beach, he ordered 

 the waves to stop. 



" My friends, this is, in my judgment, a golden 

 opportunity for this country. You may legis- 

 late here as you please, but you might as well 

 legislate against the heat of this August sun ; 

 you might as well legislate against the stars by 

 night or the sunshine by day, as to legislate 

 against the preference that is imbedded in the 

 human mind, in human reason^ and in human 

 imagination. The world prefers gold. The in- 

 stinct of every human being is toward it. It is 

 the only metal that contains so much value in 

 such a small body. It is the most portable of 

 metals. While it shares with silver a great 

 many of its features, and while in its onward 

 and upward movement among the nations of the 

 earth it has always had silver as a contestant, 

 and they have traveled side by side, yet various 

 processes have come into operation which have 

 made them part company. 



" How have those processes been brought 

 about? Most naturally in the world. In a 



policy which was entered upon the English 

 statute books in 1816. and which therefore more 

 frequently bears that date, gold was adopted as 

 the single standard of value. Now look at the 

 process as it has gone on from 1816 in England. 

 What was the next step? For a great many 

 years the Latin Union and Germany and our- 

 selves, the large silver-using countries of India 

 and the South American republics and Mexico, 

 continued to use silver. For a great many years 

 there was no considerable disturbance. 



"Silver mining was not exploited to the high 

 point of perfection that it is to-day, and the 

 world's supply of silver was not so great as to 

 cause unusual fluctuations. But when Bismarck 

 thought that he could inflict a greater blow on 

 his old enemy, France, than by the mere paying 

 of the indemnity which he compelled them to 

 pay to Germany for the Franco-Prussian War, 

 he decided to make them pay it in gold, and to 

 use that opportunity to put Germany upon a 

 gold basis and bring together the various dis- 

 cordant and inharmonious systems of currency 

 which the minor states had, and to put all 

 squarely upon the gold basis. The consequence 

 was that the old German thaler, which originated 

 in that valley down in Bavaria which gives 

 the name to our own dollar, came upon the 

 markets of the world through the melting-pot, 

 and they began to feel this extra and unexpected 

 supply. 



" The consequence was that silver showed 

 weakness in the markets of the world, and in 

 1872, Germany having discarded silver in 1871, 

 Norway, Sweden, Denmark, France, and Italy 

 had to cave in at once and close their mints to 

 the free coinage of silver. Now,- what was the 

 next step ? Holland stood out until 1875, when 

 she caved in. Russia stopped in 1876, except 

 the coinage of some silver dollars for the Chinese 

 trade. Belgium, Switzerland, and Greece stopped 

 in 1878. Austria-Hungary stopped in 1879. 

 Roiimania stopped in 1890 ; and now the last 

 tolling note of the funeral bell is ringing over 

 the doom of silver as a money metal as India, the 

 great sink for silver, shuts its mints to free coin- 

 age. 



" And here this great and proud nation of 

 people, who love their citizenship and their spv- 

 eignty as a people ; this magnificent Christian 

 nation, with its men and its women beyond any 

 comparison in domestic spirit, in civic spiri,t in 

 social life, with any people on the face of the 

 earth ; this great nation, where over a greater 

 area of territory than is known on the face of the 

 earth elsewhere one language is spoken, where 

 there is one set of laws and one system of polit- 

 ical thought this great arena of civilization 

 and liberty is to be asked, alone among all the 

 nations of the earth, to go down upon its knees 

 worshiping, like a gibbering idiot, the idol that 

 has been rejected by every other civilized coun- 

 try in God's world. 



" I believe that within the next twenty years 

 and many gentlemen here will live to see that 

 time we shall see this whole free-silver craze 

 laid out in the same graveyard along with slav- 

 ery, along with repudiation, along with fiat 

 money. The evolutionary processes of the world 

 are against you, gentlemen. You may legislate 

 ' until the cows come home,' but in the morn- 



