New Ulm review. (New Ulm, Brown County, Minn.) 1892-1961, 1894-08-08

| the change of administration, they a.
once procured the redemption Of these
notes in gold, and this gold was in It's turn
,, hurried out of the country to Europe for
various purposes, especially to aid Austro-
Hungary to place itself, like the rest of
Europe, on a gold basis. This
J. s~ Great Outflow of Gold
| was threatening the interconvertibility of
the two metals and was fast drifting US into
| a state OF silver recommendation, or eXclu-
| sive silver circulation. The gold was rush
| ing out of the country faster than the sill
yer was rushing into the treasury. This
| threw the financial and business world
| TITO a panic Money disappeared from
| circulation and went into hiding. It was
| as hard to borrow money for the rich as it
was for the poor: Under these conditions
and to relieve the tention, distrust and
| alarm, congress repealed the purchasing
J clause of the Sherman law-that feature
| requiring the government to purchase
| every month 100000 ounces of silver.
| This was not the demonstration of silver
! 1t was, in effect, merely the suspension of
| silver coinage, or the enlargement of our
| silver currency. It was for the purpose Of
keeping up the equilibrium of the two
! metals and to keep them from running
from each other. In other words, it was
for the purpose of keeping up the inter-
| convertibllity of our silver with our
gold, for, as I have pointed out, we need
gold dollars to maintain and float our. SO
| cent silver dollars.
The moment silver dollar is not con-
| vertible into gold dollar, silver, now as
| in the early days of our nation, will en-
tirely usurp the place of gold and drive the
latter out of circulation and into hiding
| This would reduce us to state of mono
metalism, a state of exclusive silver
circulation. Our 1896, 100000 of gold
! would at once disappear from cir
culation. Instead of having combined
gold and silver currency, as we have to-
day, amounting to 81 ,313, 200, 600, we would
be reduced to an exclusive silver currency
o1 $647, 0OO, 900. Even with the free coinage
of silver it would take years to supply the
| vacuum, and in the meantime the country
would be suffering under an immense and
extraordinary contraction of the currency
! The country would be in far sadder state
| than it is even today. We would all suffer
and be oppressed, except the owners of
| silver mines and silver bullion. They
! would reap big harvest, but it would be
at the expense of all the rest of us-of the
| entire country.
No, my friends, silver monometallism is
| at least as dangerous as gold monometal-
ism. Ne honest man, having the good Of
his csuntky al heart. wants either. We
want honest, genuine bimetallism. We
have it in a measure and to a limited ex-
tent today. And the substantial, the
statesmanlike and the patriotic question
is, how to maintain and enlarge it, not
how to destroy it. We can, by ourselves,
sustain it to limited and local degree, as
we have ever since the Bland act of 1876,
and as we never succeeded in doing be-
fore. We can enlarge it to it's greatest
limit and put it on an enduring basis by
international agreement among the lead
! ing commercial nations of the world. The
! former is bimetallism, the latter inter-
national, .he former rests on the prin-
ciris ct fa9erconvertibility, the latter on
mutual agreement In the former case a
SO cent silver dollar passes current because
it can be converted at will into gold dol
lar. In the latter case the same silver
dollar passes current the world over, be-
cause all great commercial nations have
| agreed to receive it as such on a parity
, with gold A free coinage which sustains
and upholds bimetallism is desired by all
| friends of good government and honest
! money. A free coinage which would at
| one fell blow
! Strike Down Bimetallism
metallism, not desired by anybody except
the most extreme infati onists and the
| owners of silver mines and silver bullion
1 far f~u how Gil
| to sell or to coin, and theirs would not be
the initiation harvest. Why, even the sill
| yer nonometalism of China is more honest
! than the silver recommendation sought
| here, for silver circulates there on it's COM
J mercial or bullion. value and not on it's
! coin or token value And yet, in spite of
| this fact, silver has gone down in that
| country from a value of S1.67 per tael in
1871, to a value of 1914 cents per tael in
| 1898, and this in the face of an exclusive
J silver circulation.
But it is urged that there is an INSULT
| Gent amount of money in circulation for
| the healthy business of the country, and
| that this scarcity of money is one of the
| chief causes of hard times and low prices,
particularly the low price of wheat. This
contention is untrue, and is not warranted
by the facts, as will appear from the fol-
lowing statement compiled by the bureau
of statistics, showing the population and
per capita circulation for every year since
1866, and the average price of wheat per
bushel for every year since 1869:
A statement of the population and per
capita circulation of money in the United
States from 1867 to June 1, 1894, and value
| of wheat per bushel from 1870 to 1898:
oney in. Value of
Popula! ion Circulation Wheat
| Years. June 80. Per Capita. Bushel.
1857. st, I'll 900 $ls.2S ......
/ 1868. .......... 8 ,975, 900 1889 ....
l 1850 .E6QO0 l7fl