Arkansas true Democrat., 1858-01-05
Hard Money Prices.


 
 Hard Money Prices.
 A vague kind of notion appears to be enter. tained by some persons that, under a solid mo- ney system prices would be greatly and per manehtly reduced, perhaps to one-half of theil present rates.
 It is, however, an error to suppose that per manently high prices are every where and at all times the necessary consequences of paper money, and low rices of solid money. Prices are no where lower than in Sweden where bank notes of as low a denomination as six cents are issued; no where are they higher than in California and some other lands where only gold and silver are recognized as money.
 It is sometimes said that money like water will find its level" But taking the globe throughout, neither money nor water ever finds one level. The Lake of Constance is 15OC feet above the level of the Atlantic; the Cas- plan Sea is 300 feet below it. The water le- vels of various countries differ greatly. The difference in the money levels of various coun-
 
 very considerable. If one days labor in the United States will produce bushel of wheat, and if it takes ten days labor (other things being equal) to produce a bushel of wheat in Poland, the rate of wages in the United States will be ten times as great as in Poland, and the rate of wages will determine the price of the products ot labor. Under the case supposed (and the suppostion is not far from the reality,) the United States will, in proportion to population, have ten times the power to purchase gold and silver that Poland possesses
 With us in the South. under a solid money system, the prices our staple would bear abroad, would mainly determine the rate of prices at home--not the price it would bear in any one year, but the price it would bear on an average of ten or twenty years. The price of cotton would determine both the price of cotton lands and of labor employed in the production of cotton. These would determine the price of land and labor employed in the production of corn; and so, ultimately, of all other land and labor.
 As Malthus has justly observed, the tendency of paper money is sometimes to raise prices to the highest rates, and at others to sink them to the lowest. Under solid money system, we should never have prices as high as they are in times of bank expansion, nor so low as in times Of bank contraction. An average of the rates Of prices for the last ten years, would show what the scale of prices would be if we had none other than gold and silver money.
 The tendency of paper money first to raise prices and then to depress them, is strikingly shown in report made many years ago to the Legislature of Pennsylvania. Very exact in- qulres in nineteen counties, showed that in loO9, before the bank mania began, the average price of land was 52 dollars an acre. During the time of the imitation, from 1914 to 1917, the same lands averaged 1l6 dollars an acre. During the contraction that followed, in 10l9, they averaged only 40 dollars an acre.
 In those ten years, the population of Penn sylvania increased from eight hundred thousand to million. The hard working Germans did not cease to labor, and the thrifty Quakers did not cease to save; yet the price of lands was 23 per cent less than it was before the bank mania began.
 In 1921, miller of Ohio, wishing to pay his subscription to Baltimore paper, "sod four barrels of flour to obtain the note of five dol lars that was remitted." This was after that | Sl ..ol G. been four years in operation.
 The following quotation from the Pittsburg Mercury, gives the prices of different articles in that city, in May, 1921:
 "Flour barrel, one dollar; whiskev, 15 cents @ gallon; good merchantable pine boards, 20 cents hundred feet; sheep and calves one dol lar head-foreign goods at the old prces.- One bushel and half of wheat will buy pound of coffee; barrel of flour will buy pound ot tea; twelve and half barrels will buy one yard of superfne broad cloth"
 Such was the rate of prices produced by reaction of the paper money system. We could multiply examples, but where would be the use? Who that lived in the west in the years of confusion that followed the suspension of specie payments in 1887, has not both seen and felsthe effects of paper money in first rais- ing prices inordinately high and the sinking them inordinately low. Nor is it always that a community rapidly recovers from this ar- tifcial depression of prices. We doubt if in some parts of Mississippi, the prices of land have yet attained to the specie level-that is to the prices they would have borne, if paper mo- ney had never been introduced into the State. Do the people want stable prices, neither in. ordinately high in one year, nor inordinately low Tn another? Then it is their own power to effect this object. All they have to do is gra- dually to supplant paper money by gold and silver