THE FARMER AND THE CURREN'CY. 371 



affected by other things than abundance or scarcity of money. 

 The tables are used by those upon all sides of monetary con- 

 troversy to sustain their views. From these and other tables 

 diagrams may be constructed to represent quickly to the eye 

 whatever tlie tables may teach. Some things can be thus 

 shown with entire accuracy, as, for example, the appreciation 

 of gold as compared with silver, or tlie depreciation of silver as 

 compared with gold, as one may prefer to term it. In this 

 case there are but two commodities concerned, and their 

 variation may be shown with entire accuracy, but where a 

 large number of elements come in, it is not always so easy to 

 determine what the lesson of the table or the diagram actually 

 is. A number of tables, diagrams, and other statistical 

 matter, will be found in Appendix G, to which the reader 

 is referred for the material for an exhaustive study of the 

 currency question. 



The argument for the single gold standard may be stated 

 as follows, in the language of a supposed earnest advocate of 

 that policy : — 



I. It is just. The variation of prices is not caused by the 

 appreciation of metallic money, the volume of which increases 

 as steadily as that of other commodities, indeed more steadily, 

 since nothing else is so carefully preserved from destruction, 

 but by the decrease of cost of production of commodities. As 

 production and transportation are cheapened by modern proc- 

 esses, prices must decrease, and in so doing will still leave the 

 same margin of profit to the producer and transporter. Tiie 

 late fall of prices in the United States by no means represents 

 a real fall in values, but a squeezing out of imaginary values 

 which never really existed, and this is true not only of such 

 property as is usually represented by stocks and bonds, and 

 exhibited in failures of manufacturing enterprises, and the 

 "reorganization" of railroads, but of real estate, which, espe- 

 cially in the west, has been held at highly inflated values, upon 

 which it could not possibly be made to earn interest. What 

 we call a fall in value is therefore nothing but a sudden real- 

 ization of true value, and the shattering of hopes which had 

 .never any real foundation. Statesmanship considers the per- 



