The weekly intelligencer. [volume] (Lexington, Mo.) 1891-1901, 1893-09-30

INTEL
force required to count it, stand unem-
ployed, and needs the job.
How long will financiers keep up the
superstition that a dollar for which
they are actually paying two per cent
premium above par in gold is subject
to a metaphysical discount of forty
three per cent? All the cities of the
United States have stopped currency
payments between each other for want
of a supply of silver dollars, and yet
the United States has only been pre-
vented from coming an abundance of
silver dollars by the hostility of the
very banks which are now compelled
to violate the law for want of these
very dollars. The astounding feature
of the monetary situation is TO see and
hear men who stand for millions of
dollars, who represent Wall street,
who regard the total demonstration
of silver rs if it had no constitutional
or economic obstacles in the way.
A clause in the federal constitution
forbids the states to make anything
but gold and silver coin legal tender in
payment of debts. This exception
from the prohibition reserves to each
state permission to make gold and sill
yer coin legal tender in payment of all
debts. Hence, even if congress should
enact that only gold coln should be the
standard and legal tender, any one of
the forty-four states could constitution
| ally pass q counter statute, making
silver coin legal tender, even for GUS
toms duties, within its own limits.
That which can be made full legal
tender by authority of the United
States, though through state action,
would be legal tender to the United
States in payment of customs duties.
Amid the population of New York
City there are hundreds of thousands
of people so saturated with monomet-
allie assumption that it seems to them
as easy to legislate silver out of the
financial world as to create a pound for
cats. They do not know or dream
that it would plunge the whole civil
lied world into bankruptcy to do the
act, if it could successfully be done,
by all the Legislative and financial
means in our power. Their views are
accurately reflected, or sedulously as
sumed, by Mr.. Eckels, III boy comp
~troller, in his statement in the North
American Review, that the only motive
OF congress in legislating with a view
to avert the further decline of silver
was to make owners of silver mines
rich. They are reflected also by Mr..
Cleveland's narrow and utterly absurd
message, declaring hat the issue of
$52, 0OO, 900 of treasury notes per year,
for three years, secured by deposits of
silver bullion to their full value at the
date of issue, has precipitated the
present crisis. In fact, the transaction
is n on which the government is
reasonably certain of an ultimate
profit of fifty per cent. The whole
sum involved is but six months of the
governments income. 1t is less than
half the shrinkage in deposits of New
York banks since his inauguration. 1t
is far less of the cheaper metal than )
France has frequently taken at par in
exchange for the dearer in order to
the two, and in so doing has
made herself the firmest specie-holding
among nations.
Prof. Denslow says that the applica-
ion of the logic %enunciated by the
New York bankers to the present cri-
lis would be that the crisis itself has
been produced wholly by the progress
hitherto made toward ~demonetizing
Besides the constitutional difficulty
demonetizing silver, he says, it is n
point of plain, economic horse sense
hat every attempt to dispense with the
metal must bring it into larger
circulation and use. To the extent
hat the currency is contracted, and
prices fall, it is made more impossible
o use gold coin, which always eX-
pressed large values, and which, by the
characterization of silver, would express
till larger ones, to convey values
which were always small, and which, ,
~ that step, are made very much {
mailer.
AS a surveyors chain will not meas
ire thousandths of en- inch, he says, so {
sold coin cannot be made small enough :
or the ribbon, peanut and cigar trade. .
t could never heretofore be the cur I
ency of wages, of the retail trade or I
# the necessaries of life, and hence it /
iould not be the medium of redemption :
II corn basis of any paper currency to /
re used for these purposes. But since
he elimination of silver, if practicable, I
you'd reduce the volume of the worlds :
money by one-half, it would, according =
o the celebrated DaVenant-Kin rule, :
Increase its purchasing value five
ines. The wheat which now sells for
ixty cents per bushel, would then sell
or twelve cents, and the mortgage of
'2O, 900, which can now be paid off by
$1,000 unskilled days work, or fifty
i've years, would then call for the sim |
ar labor of 275 years. In the degree
hat the same commodity becomes '
worthless money it is inevitable that
DIN of less value must be accessible as
Is means of transfer, or the vast l
aboring mass of mankind would re- al