THE PAST AND FUTURE OF GOLD. 



43 



A study of any of these tables will convince one that there is 

 an enormous exaggeration in the way the cheap-money men talk 

 about the fall of prices. While there has been to some extent a 

 fall in the price of most products in centers of trade, it is by no 

 means very extensive or portentous. 



According to Mulhall (History of Prices, page 7), cotton in the 

 United States averages thirty-three per cent higher in 18S1-'S3 

 than in 1841-'50 ; and wheat two per cent higher. Owing, how- 

 ever, to the great fall in transportation, and to improvements in 

 agricultural machinery, the farmers' increased remuneration is 

 by no means expressed by these figures. For corn the showing 

 is still better, probably amounting to something like one hundred 

 per cent for the average American farmer. During the same 

 period pork has risen fifty-six per cent ; tobacco, forty-four per 

 cent ; butter, forty-five per cent, and cheese eighty per cent all in 

 centers of distribution, while they have risen still more in the 

 hands of the producer. If my personal recollection is at all 

 reliable, we pay in Toledo, Ohio > to-day more for eggs, chickens, 

 potatoes, and fruits than twenty years ago in greenbacks. Thus, 

 by a little discrimination, we see that the " great fall in prices," 

 so often and so lugubriously spoken of, is in the great centers 

 where the consumers and not where the producers live. In- 

 stead, therefore, of being a calamity, this fall in prices has 

 been an unmixed blessing. The farmer gets more for his prod- 

 uct; the city man pays less. Such has been the result of the 

 construction of railroads, the most beneficent and far-reach- 

 ing of all practical inventions. And yet, with locomotive whis- 

 tles reaching well-nigh every ear in the country, from lines of 

 railroads having a mileage of nearly one hundred and seventy 

 thousand in the United States, our free-silver friends ignore their 

 existence, and, on the basis of London prices in former times, 

 build up a purely imaginary farmers' paradise in contemporary 

 America. 



The evidence afforded by wages shows either that the money 

 standard has not risen, as claimed, or that the working classes 

 have received an astounding increase of wages. Take the trades 

 in which the conditions are wholly or comparatively unchanged 



