582 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



denied that on the whole and in the long run general prosperity 

 has been great and wide during the last generation. The usual 

 cycles of speculative activity and industrial depression have ap- 

 peared, and at the successive periods of surface depression the 

 cry has been raised that some unusual cause, like the demoneti- 

 zation of silver, was leading to general calamity. But the up- 

 ward turn of the wave soon reappeared, and the growth of ma- 

 terial prosperity, good years and bad years taken together, has 

 not been interrupted. 



Looking, too, at the relations of debtors and creditors, we find 

 on the whole little to complain of. No doubt a period of simple 

 rise or fall in general prices operates unjustly. When prices and 

 money incomes rise, creditors do not get their dues ; when they 

 fall, debtors are subjected to a painful burden. But where we 

 have the phenomenon of money wages and money incomes which 

 are steady and on the whole probably increasing — and this is 

 what the world has seen during the last generation — the situation 

 approaches as near justice as is possible in things human. A 

 debtor who borrowed five, ten, or twenty years ago has an undi- 

 minished money income, and can not be said to feel special hard- 

 ship when he repays his debt, even though the prices of commod- 

 ities may have decreased. That individual debtors and classes 

 of debtors may have suffered is beyond question ; but in the mass 

 the situation has not given rise to general hardship. 



Hitherto, therefore, the adoption of the gold standard, the 

 drift toward restricting silver to use as a g^cm-subsidiary coin, 

 have not worked ill. Indeed, it may be said to have prevented ill, 

 since the use of silver side by side with gold, in view of the 

 enormous increase of the production of silver, in all probability 

 would have disturbed seriously the stability of the monetary 

 medium. What, now, of the future ? Are the same tendencies 

 likely to appear in years to come, and is the gold standard likely 

 to work well in the future as it has in the past ? 



In answering these questions we must not refuse to face cer- 

 tain facts in the situation insisted upon by the bimetallists. The 

 supply of gold available for monetary use is not likely to in- 

 crease rapidly in the future. The production of gold has been 

 nearly stationary for the past twenty years. In the last two or 

 three years an upward movement has appeared ; it remains to 

 be seen, however, whether any permanent advance will be main- 

 tained. The use of gold in the arts is apparently increasing, and 

 is likely to continue to increase ; and it absorbs a growing part 

 of the annual supply. Meanwhile the wealth and population of 

 civilized countries are advancing rapidly. If stability in money 

 affairs is to be secured, some steady increase in their circulating 

 medium must be provided for. If we regard gold coin alone, and 



