Gold, Silver and the Coinage of the Silver Dollar. 



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tions affecting them at the times of comparison. To illustrate — 

 a comparison of the market price of a given quantity of planed and 

 matched floor boards, or of neatly wrought mouldings to-day, with 

 the prices of the same articles before the invention of the Woodworth 

 planing machine, would give us no just conception of the relative 

 value or purchasing power of the money in which prices are stated at 

 the two different periods. 



So in the case of the cost of pins. The market prices at periods 

 before and after the invention of the ingenious machine, by the use of 

 which one man performed the labor theretofore performed by sixty 

 men in making an equal quantity of pins, or of the price of hooks and 

 eyes before and after the introduction of that other machine, invented 

 in Massachusetts about LSI."), by the employment of which the whole- 

 sale price was reduced from $1.50 to fifteen cents per gross in a few 

 years. In neither of these cases would the market prices of the pro- 

 duct at the two periods stated give us any true criterion of the value 

 of the money in which the prices are stated at those periods. 



The prices of steel and the products of steel at periods before and 

 after the discovery < »f Sir Henry Bessemer, might furnish us with another 

 illustration, and so we might go through the whole list of the products 

 of industry, into the production of which invention of improved pro- 

 cesses or of machinery have entered to aid the efficiency of human labor. 



It would be manifest in the cases stated that actually cheapened 

 cost of production would much more rationally account for reduced 

 prices, than to attribute the change to the enhancement of the value 

 of the money in which the prices are expressed. 



Another thought will occur to us, namely, that concurrently, and 

 very likely as the direct result of these cheapened cost and prices of the 

 products stated, the wages of labor engaged in their production might 

 not decline, but very materially advance. And this also we find to 

 accord with the observed facts. 



Judge Hughes and the members of Congress who follow in his wake, 

 although they refer in eloquent terms to those who live by the wages 

 of labor, do not anywhere, that I have been able to find, quote the wages 

 of labor, either as a component part of their tables of prices, or sepa- 

 rately*, in the maintenance of their claims, that it is gold which ha3 

 risen and not silver which has fallen, that has produced the gap be- 



The wages of labor are regarded by all the standard writers upon 

 Political Economy as a more reliable criterion of values chan gold and 



