Salt Lake evening Democrat. [volume] (Salt Lake City, Utah) 1885-1887, 1885-12-16
BOTH GOLD AND SILVER.
The Cleveland ssPIain Dealer, fze.
views the Question of
Silver Coinage.

The Secretary of the Treasury devote
a very large portion of his report to dis
cussion of the silver question This ii
very proper, as the silver question is the
most important question now connected
with the national finances.
The Secretary is positive that the pres
ent status of the silver in the coinage is
not satisfactory, and that it ought to be
changed. In this the Plain Dealer is
agreed with the Secretary; the present
status is not satisfactory.
The government now is compelled by
law to buy silver bullion and coin it into
at least two million silver dollars of stand
ard weight and fneness every month.
This is wrong. There ought to be- no such
thing as compulsory coinage.
But when Secretary Manning suggests
that the proper thing to dois to stop coin
ing silver dollars altogether, the Plain
Dealer does not agree with him. When
he asserts that we have all the silver coin
in the country now that we can make
use of with safety and to advantage, the
Plain Dealer is constrained to think that
he is in error.
The Secretary objects that silver dollars
cannot be made to circulate, and that
they have to be kept stored in vaults.
This is in a general sense true enough,
but the conclusion that he draws from
this fact, that they do not circulate be-
cause they are silver coins and worth
something less than their face value in
gold is not q true conclusion. If they
had more silver in them they would not
circulate any more than they do now,
and if silver dollar was worth intrinsic
ally more than gold dollar it still would
accumulate in the government vaults.
Gold coins do not circulate even to the
extent that silver coins do People are
not accustomed to carry gold eagles, half
eagles or quarter eagles in their pockets
when they go to market and in the ordi-
nary transactions of trade these coins are
seen but rarely. People do not want
them, and object to being paid in them
even more strenuously than they do to re-
ceiving silver. And SO the reason that
silver dollars do not circulate is the same
reason that gold five, ten and twenty dol
lar pieces do not circulate, and that is be-
cause any kind of big coin is cumber-
some, inconvenient, easily lost, and in
every respect less to be desired than pa.
per bill representing it in value.
The Secretary seems to think that if we
were to stop now we could get along with
the silver dollars. We have two hundred
and fifteen millions, but if more are coined /
there will be various sorts of financial /
trouble. But this same story has been
told and retold by the gold money men
for years. And yet under very defective
silver coinage law, based upon wrong
principle, we have coined over two hun
dred millions of silver dollars and not one
Of the dire calamities predicted has hap
pened. Gold has not been driven out of
The country; it has not been boarded any
more than it has always been boarded
md will always be, and trade and busi-
hess have been benefited more than in
ured by the continued coinage of silver.
The proper plan is not to stop the coin
age of silver. 1t is to put the coinage on
! common sense basis. It is not to dis
against silver by declaring that
,old Is the only metallic standard of
money, it is to recognize coin-that is
,old and silver, one equal with the other
as the basis of currency, rs the consti-
utlon contemplates and is required by
he very nature of things The remedy
5 not to declare that there shall be no
more silver coined, it is to say that silver
nd gold may be coined whenever there
any of either coin, and that metallic
money shall be gold and silver money.
The thing to do is to make coinage
ree