The Portland daily press., 1877-11-10
The Silver Bill.

Ihe imminent danger of the passage Of the
bill authorizing the coinage of silver dollars
which shall be legal tender for all debts,
public and private, leads to consideration of
the practical working of the measure; and
the more it is looked at, the more disastrous
| and altogether undesirable does it seem. If a
dollars worth of silver were to be stamped as
dollar the case would be bad enough, for
there would be forced upon the public
bulky and lnconvenient medium for exchanges
and one subiact to fluctuations, as the supply
OF silver should increase or diminish. Still
less endurable is the proposition to coin
dollar containing 4123 grains of silver, which
is worth now about SO cents and which NAV
be worth 80 next week and 95 the week after.
The adoption of this medium is imitation in a
very bad form, for it adds great inconven-
fence in handling to all the other evils of a
redundant and deprecated currency.
The inconvenience may be illustrated by a
little estimate of the weight of the currency.
One hundred of these silver dollars would
weigh little over seven pounds; so the man
who wants to carry an hundred dollars in
his pockets must divide it or run the risk of be-
coming permanently lop-sided. If it be thous-
and dollars, weighing seventy rounds, he vii,
get abundant exercise if he calry it in a bag in
his hand or slung to belt. II ten thousand
dollars are to be taken from one place to
another, the victim must use wheelbarrow
or hand cart, and must give his porter SUBJ
stantial aid in loading the treasure. To
carry one hundred thousand do.lars, weighing
seven thousand pounds, reco lrse must be
had to drays. Nor is the difficulty of carriage
the only drawback; the counting of these
sums of money will consume much time, as
each coin must be looked at to avoid the dan
ger of counterfeits-a slow and toilsome
process.
To be sure, human ingenuity will devise
means for obviating some of these difficulties
by use of checks and certificates of deposit:
brokers and bankers will take the huge mass
OF stuff and give paper acknowledgements
for it. But the people must pay for this re-
lief and the only persons who seem likely to
profit in the operation are the money chang
ers whose aid must be invoked and paid for.
Tradesmen of all classes must suffer from the
glut of silver which will flow in upon them,
for the banks cannot possibly afford to take
silver on deposit and furnish men to count 1t
in and out. So the retailers must pay it In
bulk to the wholesalers and the latter must
get rid of it as best they may. These are
not by any means all the practical inconve-
nienees of this bad business, b1t they are
enough to illustrate.
The chief victims of this, as of all other
financial quackery, are the working men, in
whose name-save the mark this move
ment is made. The workman must take his
pay in the silver dollar which will buy him
only ninety-three cents worth of food and
clothes now and is likely to buy him still less
by and by. In times of imitation goods rise
in price faster than wages and nothing can
be so harmful to the man whose daily wages
must purchase his daily bread as fluctuations
and uncertainty in the value of his
pay. Middlemen of all kinds, everybody
with capital, can protect themselves
substantially from loss by waiting for
favorable turns Of things or by making up
in one direction what they lose in another;
but upon the unprotected head of the work
ingman beats every financial storm. Yet so
deluded are they by the cunning sophistries
of designing demagogues, that large part of
the laboring men, particularly of the West,
would hail initiation as boon to them.
Since these things are SO, the question nat
urally arises: who has a sufficiently potent
interest in silver to force through this obnox-
ious measure? In the first place all the wild
headed indationists favor it as they would
favor anything looking to an increase of the
currency. Many Of the Southerners favor it
because they propose to sell their cotton in
England for gold and pay their debts to the
Northerners in silver. But the vtalizing
force of the movement lies in the cupidity of
the Bonanza princes who mine silver in Ne
vada. So great has been the production of
this metal that the market is altogether over
stocked and a new channel for its use is
sought. France has ceased coming it, in
England it is legal tender for only small sums
and Germany is retiring the most of her sill
yer coins from circulation and selling the
silver as fast as she finds opportunity. So
nothing is left but'to induce this great stupid
nation to coin dollars, make them unlimited
legal tender and thus afford market for
their superabundant production OF the once
precious metal.
1t looks very likely now that it will be
done. The bill has passed the House, will
probably, though with more difficulty, get
through the Senate. Then nothing will stand
betweenl the nation and imitation but the
President. From him there is not much to
hope. His special Ohio representatives in
the House voted for the bill, and the versatile
Stanley Matthews, his reputed mouthpiece
in the Senate, seems inclined to favor it. If
we could only have month or two of Grant
at this juncture! Before his sturdy good
sense and resolute will all this financial folly
would stink away abashed or be sternly re-
buked as was the initiation madness of 1874.
1t is subject for congratulation that our own
representative, Mr.. Reed, and all the other
Maine congressman set their faces steadily
against this wretched business. 1t is unfor-
tunate that our sister states are not as intel
ligently represented.