84 
THE RURAL NEW-YORKER. 
JAN. 3i 
Farm Politics. 
Here it is proposed to discuss with freedom and fairness, ques¬ 
tions of National or State policy that particularly concern farm¬ 
ers. The editors disclaim responsibility for the opinions of cor¬ 
respondents. The object is to develop a true and fair basis for 
organization among farmers. Let us think out just what we want 
and then strive for it. 
DEMONETIZATION OF SILVER. 
I am sorry to see that Ohio’s foxy Senator has been able 
In his speech on the silver question in the last session of 
Congress, to convince even a leading farmers’ paper like 
TnE Rural New-Yorker, that no deceit was practiced in 
Congress in the matter of demonetizing the silver dollar, 
as shown by its remarks on an article by Alva Agee on 
page 896 of The Rural for 1890. Senator Sherman could, 
with more truth, have declared that the silver dollar never 
was demonetized, than that it was not clandestinely de¬ 
monetized. Literally it is true that the silver dollar was 
never demonetized, though practically it is false. The act 
of February 12, 1873, known as the demonetizing act, did 
not demonetize the standard silver dollar, nor did it make 
anything else the unit bf value. But it only authorized 
the coinage of silver into half and quarter dollars and 
dimes, according to the reduced standard of 1853, and pro¬ 
hibited these coins from being a legal tender for more than 
five dollars. The old silver dollar unit of 371J^ grains of 
pure silver was retained, and the silver dollar’s practical 
demonetization accomplished in the following words: 
(Section 17 ) No coins either of gold, silver, or minor 
coinage, shall hereafter be issued from the mint, other than 
those of the denominations, standards and weights herein 
set forth. 
As this did not embrace the dollar, the dollar was prac¬ 
tically demonetized; but as this fact only appeared from a 
careful study of the whole bill, many of the members of 
Congress who voted for it were ignorant of what they had 
done. Eminent and usually careful statesmen of both 
Houses expressed their complete surprise when shown just 
what they had voted for. “It was” says the author of 
the article on “ Money,” in the “ Library of Universal 
Knowledge,” “ a part of a well concerted policy, begun in 
Europe, to bring about the single gold standard,” that is, 
as the Western farmers declare, “A Gold Bug’s Bill.” 
When the cheat was discovered, the bill was, so far, an¬ 
nulled, and the silver dollar restored to circulation. 
Orleans County, Vt. [DR.] T. H. HOSKINS. 
R. N.-Y.—There is neither an intention nor a wish here 
to justify or palliate the treatment of the silver dollar in 
the bill which virtually demonetized it in 1873. Our only 
intention is very briefly to demonstrate, beyond cavil, that 
we were right in denying the imputation that the silver 
dollar was then dropped from the coinage clandestinely, 
surreptitiously, by stealth or illegally. Those who have 
made this charge usually permit it to be understood that 
the band of secret conspirators guilty of the turpitude 
foisted into the bill an obscure or ambiguous clause or 
section so worded as to escape the notice of the other 
members of both Houses of Congress as well as the news¬ 
paper press of the country and the general public, and 
that sufficient time was not allowed to enable others to 
discover the fraud, and it is pretty plainly intimated that 
if sufficient opportunity had been permitted the disgrace- 
lul scheme would have been detected and exposed. 
The bill was first sent to Congress by Mr. Geo S. Bout- 
well, Secretary of the Treasury, on April 25,1870— nearly 
three years before its passage, on February 12, 1873. It was 
entitled, in large capitals, “An act revising and amending 
the laws relative to the mint, the assay offices, and the 
coinage of the United States.” Thus on its face it showed 
that it was a bill revising all the laws relating to the mint 
and coinage. It was drawn up by Mr. Knox, Deputy 
Comptroller of the Currency, who had charge of the mint 
then, and in sending the bill to Congress, on April 25, 
Secretary Boutwell sent with it a communication from 
Mr. Knox, in which, under a conspicuous, large-type head¬ 
ing—“ Silver Dollar; its discontinuance as a Stand 
ard”— he said, among other things bearing on this particu¬ 
lar subject: " The coinage of the-silver dollar, the history 
t of whicl^ is here given, is discontinued in the proposed 
bill. * * * The present gold dollar is made the unit 
in the proposed bill and the silver-dollar piece is discon¬ 
tinued.” What can be clearer than that ? The bill con¬ 
tained a large number of provisions each embodied in a 
separate section. Section 15 was as follows: 
And he it further enacted , That of the silver coins, the 
weight of the half dollar, or piece of 50 cents, shall be 192 
grains, and that of the quarter-dollar and dime shall be, 
respectively, one-half and one-fifth of the weight of said 
half-dollar; that the silver coin issued in conformity with 
above section shall be a legal tender in any one payment 
of debts for all sums less than $1. 
Then section 18 (not 17) was, verbatim, the same as that 
quoted above by Dr. Hoskins. The bill was printed on 
paper with wide margins intended for notes and 
comments, and each member of both Houses of Congress 
was furnished with a copy, and copies were also supplied 
to the chief officials in the mint and assay offices and to 
money experts throughout the country, with the request 
that they should be returned with notes and suggestions, 
and Congress ordered 5,000 extra copies to be printed for 
general distribution. The section of the bill which dis¬ 
continued the coinage of the silver dollar was discussed by 
all the experts, some favoring the provision and others 
disapproving of it. In a number of cases special attention 
was called to the demonetizing feature of the measure by 
capitalized headings. Thus Hon. James Pollock, formerly 
Governor of Pennsylvania, and then Director of the Mint, 
says in capital letters: “Silver dollar, half-dime, and 
three cent pieces discontinued ;” E. B. Elliot, late Actuary 
of the Treasury, says in capitals: “ Standard silver dollar 
—its discontinuance as a standard;” Dr. A. R. Linderman, 
formerly Director of the Mint, says in capitals also: “ Dis¬ 
continuance of silver dollar: ” Hon. James Ross heads his 
remarks in capitals as follows : “ The present silver dollar 
should not be discontinued,” and so on. All these and 
others pithily discussed the matter, and the government 
printed a 100-page volume containing the reports, and 
every Congressman got a copy. This was away back in 
1870, so that there was ample time to read and understand 
the document before the final passage of the bill in 1873. 
The Committee on Finance had charge of the bill in the 
Senate, and the Committee on Coinage in the House. 
The members of the former were John Sherman, Justin 
S. Morrill, George H. Williams, Alexander G. Cattel, Wil¬ 
lard Warner, Reuben Fenton and Thomas F. Bayard ; and 
of the latter, William D. Kelley, Samuel Hooper, John 
Hill, Noah Davis, Peter W. Strader, and John A. Gris¬ 
wold. These were all honorable men, and included Re¬ 
publicans and Democrats, as well as monometallists and 
bimetallists—there were no “ silver men ” then, in the 
present acceptation of the term. What earthly reason 
could induce them to attempt to hoodwink and defraud 
their colleagues and the nation ? Mr. Kelley, of Pennsyl¬ 
vania, the Father of the House, says, with regard to the 
action of the Conference Committee on the bill : 
We proceeded with great deliberation to go over the bill 
not only section by section, but line by line, and word by 
word ; the bill has not received the same elaborate consid¬ 
eration from the Committee on Coinage of this House, but 
the attention of each member was brought to it at the 
earliest day of this session ; each member procured a copy 
of the bill and there has been a thorough examination of 
the bill again.—Congressional Globe, volume 100, page 322. 
He used equally forcible language with regard to the 
action of the Senate Committee. The bill was passed by 
the Senate after nearly three days’ debate, on January 10, 
1871, and was sent to the House, where every section in it 
was thoroughly debated. The debates on it in the Senate 
occupy 66 columns of the “blanket-sheet” Congressional 
Globe; and those in the House, 78 columns. Numerous 
amendments on it were made in both Houses, among them 
three different ones on the original draft of Section 15. 
It was printed 11 times separately by direction of Con¬ 
gress, and twice embodied in the annual report of the 
Deputy Comptroller of the Currency. It was read in lull 
in both Houses a number of times, and scattered broad¬ 
cast through the country. Yet we are told, forsooth, that 
the most important provision in it from fiist to last was 
passed clandestinely! 
Two of the amendments on the original bill related to 
the trade silver dollars, intended not for circulation as 
legal tender, but for trade chiefly with China and Japan. 
Both were fully discussed in both houses, and the matter 
bore directly on the demonetization of the old silver dollar 
of 412^ grains troy of standard silver. Finally, however, 
the bill was passed virtually as it came from Secretary 
Boutwell. 
Section 18 (not 17), precisely as quoted by Dr. Hoskins, 
was contained in the different bills as amended. 
Here there is room only for a very brief synopsis of 
proofs now before us with regard to the truth of our state¬ 
ment ; but has it not been clearly shown that there is no 
valid foundation for the imputation that the demonetiza¬ 
tion of the silver dollar by the Coinage Act of 1873 was 
surreptitiously effected by a band of unscrupulous con¬ 
spirators, who did not allow their colleagues or the public 
time or opportunity to discover and expose their fraudu¬ 
lent trickery ? 
But if Congressmen and others at the time recognized 
the intention of sections 15 and 18, how came it that they 
quietly permitted them to become law ; while, later, they 
have been vehemently inveighing against the “outrage ” 
embodied in them. The demonetization of the silver dol¬ 
lar attracted very little public attention at the time—five 
years before the resumption of specie payment. The 
currency was altogether paper and the public at large 
thought very little about gold or silver coinage. Some of 
the members of both Houses of Congress had never seen a 
silver dollar except, perhaps, as a curiosity, and of a very 
large proportion of the general public the same could be 
said. From the establishment of the Mint, in 1792, to 1873, 
only 8,045,838 silver dollars had been coined, or about two 
months’ silver coinage now. Of these, -1,439,517 had been 
coined prior to 1805. Then President Jefferson suspended 
silver coinage, and not another silver dollar was coined 
until 1834, and from that date till 1840 only 1,300. From 
1840 to 1860, $5,000,000 of the above amount were coined for 
exportation to China and Japan, but not one of them 
entered into home circulation. Of the 1,607,021 silver dol¬ 
lars coined between 1860 and 1873 over two thirds were also 
exported for foreign trade. 
In the ordinary course of things, therefore, there could 
be very few silver dollars in the hands of Americans ; but 
an additional cause of shortage was that between 1837 and 
1853, the ratio between the gold and silver dollar was 16 to 
1, so that the silver dollar was worth more than the gold 
dollar, and accordingly it was either exported to Europe 
where it would purchase more, or melted down and sold as 
bullion or used in the arts. Thus in 1873, the silver dollar 
had fallen into “ innocuous desuetude,” and few troubled 
their heads about it. It was only when the resumption of 
specie payment in 1878, grievously oppressed the debtor 
classes, and the rapid increase of our population, m-inu- 
factures, trade and commerce urgently demanded an ex¬ 
tension of our currency; while the recent discovery of vast 
deposits of silver in the West necessitated enlarged markets 
for the white metal, that the clamor for the free coinage of 
silver arose. Then the people all over the country were 
astounded that this very thing had been permitted to drop 
quietly from the statute books a few years previously, and 
without any real foundation for tne charge, attributed 
the legislation that wrought the demonetization of their 
new idol to trickery, fraud and conspiracy. 
FARM ECONOMIES. 
Political economy is like applied chemistry—a branch of 
science which the farmer should understand since it 
directly affects his welfare, and he should not be frightened 
by the word politics from seeking information or acting 
upon it when found. One maxim of this science is that 
taxation is an evil, though a necessary one. Another is 
that in indirect taxation, such as by a duty on imports, 
the excess of price paid by the consumer, over cost in the 
cheapest market, should go into the treasury. 
Justification of the present system of national taxation 
involves the reversal of both these axioms. It involves 
the assertion that an indirect tax, when levied in certain 
ways, is an intrinsic good, and that such a tax should be 
so levied as to put a part of the enhanced cost into the 
pockets of domestic producers of the articles taxed. It is 
pleaded that the enhancement of cost by the added tax 
will be only temporary, because competition among do¬ 
mestic producers will speedily reduce prices. This is the 
“infant industry” plea of the early tariff makers; but 
the giant manufactures and mines of to day have no in¬ 
fancy to plead, while the universality of trusts and Com 
binations has enabled •' protected ” producers to tax con¬ 
sumers to the full limit of the law, by keeping the cost of 
the domestic barely within the limit of that of the im¬ 
ported article. 
As regards the theory that a tax, thus levied, is an 
intrinsic good because it benefits the laborer by excluding 
the products of pauper labor of other countries: If im¬ 
portation of low-priced products of cheap labor be an evil, 
then the lower the price the greater the evil, until the 
proposition is reached that a gift of all articles of pro¬ 
duction would be an injury, a palpably absurd assertion. 
The same reduction to absurdity can be made of the 
theory of benefit from a tax to maintain a nearby 
consumer. 
The average remuneration of all labor must be propor¬ 
tioned to its average productiveness. Freedom of ex¬ 
change has always been the most efficient means of pro¬ 
moting the productiveness of labor. It means the pro 
duction by each laborer and each locality of the things to 
which the circumstances are best adapted, while getting 
the full benefit of others’ adaptations. It is merely 
division of labor, and cooperation on a large scale. Its 
benefits are among the earliest perceptions of intelligence, 
discovered by all men, and some animals, notably beavers, 
bees and ants. 
Hindrance of this method of increasing the productive¬ 
ness of labor, while it injures laborers in the aggregate, 
hurts, most of all, the producer, the prices of whose 
products cannot be enhanced by obstruction of commeice. 
The prices of the farmer’s great stap les, vegetable and 
animal, are governed by quotations abroad. Though we 
may tax ourselves to feed them, domestic consumers will 
not pay higher prices for flour, pork or cotton than the 
paupers abroad will bid ; while obstruction to commerce 
lowers prices of farm products by increasing the cost of 
transportation; for carriers can make freights lower when 
they have cargoes both ways, and it also lowers prices by 
depriving the foreign consumer of a market, thus dimin¬ 
ishing his ability to buy. 
Politicians have taught farmers that it is a function of 
government to make people rich. Farmers have accepted 
the doctrine, but, finding tnat they are not the ones made 
rich by the obstruction of commerce, they want to try 
another means—the putting out of unlimited money by the 
government. Some years ago this was to be done by print¬ 
ing greenbacks to enormous amounts, the so-called “ Ohio 
Idea,” a measure which General Grant vetoed, to his eter¬ 
nal honor. Now it is to be done by the unlimited coinage 
of silver. The enormous and rapidly increasing produc 
tion of silver having made its price low now, and prospec¬ 
tively lower, unlimited coinage of 80 cents’ worth into dol¬ 
lars, seems a good way to make payment of debts easier. 
A more direct and less injurious method would be to make 
gold coin lighter—the time-honored method of “ relieving” 
debtors. 
This method would not serve the purpose of the noisier 
advocates of silver—the mine owners—who want the tax¬ 
payers to give a dollar for 80 cents’ worth, and, who at¬ 
tempt to veil their greed by canting about the dignity of 
silver and the wrong done to it, as if it were a person. If 
it were worth as much as in 1873, when their champion, 
Senator Stewart, voted for the Act of which they com¬ 
plain, not a word would be heard from them now. 
Unlimited 80-cent silver dollars would convert gold into 
a commodity and speedily drive it from the country, caus¬ 
ing a contraction of the circulating medium, ruinous to 
debtors as its first effect, and, as its final effect, it would 
leave a great commercial nation with a standard of value 
not recognized by any other civilized people, and in its do¬ 
mestic use as a currency fit only for barbarians, 
New Haven County, Conn. A. F. coe. 
Ministers and Politics. —I believe that every person 
under republican rule has the right to a full and free ex¬ 
pression of an honest opinion. As pure politics is as much 
of a necessity toward making a fully developed American 
citizen as pure religion, it is eminently appropriate that 
the minister should have that right fully and freely. In¬ 
asmuch as he is the exponent of the living truth, if in his 
mind is evolved what he deems a political truth which, 
if accepted by the majority, would give us better govern¬ 
mental conditions, it is not only a right but a duty for 
him to voice the sentiments which, if maintained, would 
tend to such desirable results. If the teachers of religion 
would consider it inseparable from pure politics and re¬ 
commend their congregations to support only true men as 
the exponents of such principles, we would soon be able 
to correct some of the abuses which harass us by the 
authority of government. Ministers certainly would have 
the right to recommend men or parties if they did so con- 
