The Portland daily press., 1895-07-13

tHls Dlll WAS before congress. Nor was
the purpose of the bill misunderstood, or
not understood, for Mr.. Hooper of the
committee who had it in charge plainly
stated that "the committee, after care
ful consideration, concluded that twenty
five and eight t-tenths grains of
gold constituting the standard gold
dollar should be declared the money
unit or metallic representative of tho dol
lar OF account. Instead of being incon
siderately passed the bill got far more
consideration than the Evast majority Of
congressional legislation gets Senator
| Stewart, one of tho most blatant silver
men of the present time, was in the
House at the time and voted for the bill
Now let us look at the repeal of the sill
yer purchasing act which Mr.. Talbot says
was accomplished by the whip and spur
the President The special session that re-
pealed that act was called at the very
general demand of the business men of
the country, who believed that the silver
purchasing act constituted seri 0 us
menace. Mr.. Talbot thinks they were
all mistaken; thatl really the purchasing
act was boon. Perhaps they were, though
1t is within the region Of possibility that it
is Mr. Talbot who is mistaken. Never
theless the act was repealed in response
to the epresentationssand demands of the
business men of the country. The Ho use
passed the repeal very promptly, a major
ity of the members of both parties voting
for it. Certainly it was not the whip
and spur of the President that made the
Republicans vote almost unanimously
for it, In the Senate an attempt was
made to defeat the measure by keeping
it from being brought to a vote. The
men who engaged in that movement were
the western Senators who were interested
in silver mines and had great stocks of
the white metal to sellS Of course they
viewed with alarm the destruction of
their market. They were aided by some
of the southern Senators, but almost
without exception the Senators from the
great industrial and business states of
the union were in favor of repeal and
voted for it. No doubt Mr.. Cleveland
used his influence in behalf of the passage
of the repeal bill, but his influence in
this case was on the same side as that of
the vast majority of financial authorities
and business men in the count ~, and it
was potent largely because it..was backed
up by theirs. These men are not infalli-
BILE but upon subject that many of them
have studied theoretically and all of them
had had r,racfical ayporionoa tbau
are quite as likely to be right as Mr..
Talbot At any rate they can hardly be
sneered out of the way as American
Philistines, carried away by sentiment.
Mr.. Talbot's third complaint is that the
administration has not treated the silver
demption of the greenbacks. The policy
of our government has been to maintain
the parity of our gold and silver coin,
that is to say, to keep them of equal pur-
chasing power. Everybody knows that
the bullion in our silver dollar today is
in gold. That is to say if the gold dollar
and the silver dollar circulated today
upon their bullion value the purchasing
power of the silver dollar would be a
third less than that of the gold dollar.
But the policy of the government to
it for duties and to treat it as practi-
cally redeemable in gold has kept it's pur-
chasing power up to gold. In Mexico the
silver dollar circulates at it's bullion
value only, and ours would also but for
the policy of our government to maintain
the parity of the two metals. When Mr..
Talbot asks the government to treat the
silver dollar as part of the redemption
fund, he asks it to abandon this policy
and let the silver dollar sink to it's bullion
level. If silver had been treated by the
Treasury as money of ultimate redemp-
tion, as Mr.. Talbot wants it treated, it's
representative value would have departed
Immediately and its purchasing power
would have fallen. The losses entailed
by that, especially upon the poor man for
silver is handled by the poor man far
more than by the rich, would have been
enormous No Secretary of the Treasury
has ever dared to adopt the policy Mr..
Talbot suggests. No one of them, not
even Carlisle. friendly to silver though
he was has been willing to take the re-
sponsibility of doing such thing, and
no Secretary of the Treasury ever will be,
while the price of silver is as low as it is
now, for no Secretary will dare assume
the responsibility and odium which will
follow the reducing by his act the pur-
chasing power of the silver dollar No
Secretary will dare deliberately do an act
that will make the silver dollar of the
poor man less valuable than the gold dol
lar of the rich. A hundred men in Con-
gress bracing one another up, may do it
through the free coinage of silver, but
no one man will be ready to accept the
full responsibility Y of doing it.