Pine Bluff daily graphic., 1895-10-06
CHEAP DOLLARS.
Ex-Gov. Boies' Mistakes About the Silver
 Coinage.

farmers of Iowa that they are ruined bv dear dollars and that their only hope of salvation lies in cheap dol lars. Mir Boies is too good an econo- mist to believe any such thing, and he ought to know that no man can ever rise to position higher than that of governor of Iowa by preaching what he does not believe to be true.
 He tells the Iowa farmers that the prices of their products have fallen be- cause silver was "demonetizedn in lS73. Gold, he says. was made dearer when it was made the only standard, and as gold became dearer other things meas ured in gold became cheaper. and that is why farm products are so cheap Granting this, other commodities must have become cheaper also. A fall in prices due to an advance in the value of gold must extend to all commodities There is no reason why it should stop at farm products Mr Boies is logical enough to see that and he admits it when he asks: ''Is it not equally true that the products of labor in other branches are correspondingly low?e
 Assuredly it is. It necessarily fol- lows that the farmer can exchange the products of his labor for as much as ever of the products of other mems labor. For given quantities of wheat, corn, oats, etc, he can get as much as ever of clothing, furniture, lumber, nails and other things he requires. He can get more, because the prices of things he buys have fallen more, on the average, than the prices of the things he sells Invention has done more to cheapen manufactured prod ucts than it has to cheapen agricul- tural products.
 Hence the farmer can be none the worse off for the alleged appreciation of gold, while he is the better off for the cheapening of products by inven- ton, unless he owes debts which orig mated before gold grew dearer, Not many of the existing debts of our farm- CTS originated twenty years ago.
 Mir Boies must know that it is un- reasonable to attribute any apprecia- tion which may have taken place in gold to the coinage act of 1883. It is not true that that act removed silver from our volume of standard money. There had not been a dollar of sil- yer in our standard money for more than thirty years. Gold, in fact, had been the only standard money of the country for nearly forty years. The act of 1873 contained provision under which four and half times as many trade dollars were coined within six years as had been coined of standard dollars iu more than eighty years from the establishment of the mint There would be some reason in saying that gold was made dearer by the closing of the hints of Germany, the Scandinavian states and all the states of the Latin union against siI- yer between 1871 and 1878. There is no reason in saying that the value of gold was affected by our act of 1873, which did not create use for one ounce more gold or remove one ounce of sil- yer from use as standard money.
 To the question how to lessen the present purchasing power of money and increase the selling price of prod ucts, which Mir. Boies asks himself, he returns this answer: Evidently there is but one way, and that is to increase the quantity of real money, and this is practicable in a single way and that is by return to the system of our fathers, to the money of the constitution. to the coinage of both gold and silver as standard money, instead of gold alone. !"
 Mr. Boies is too good an economist to talk like that. He must know that as matter of fact we never did have both gold and silver as standard money at any one time. An error of less than one per cent in 1792 made silver the standard from that time until 1884. A like error the other way in 1884 made gold the standard, and it has remained the standard ever since. Gold money was Sle cheaper, and although the diff ference was usually less than two per cent. 1t drove silver completely out of circulation as standard money, and it could be kept in circulation only as a subsidiary coin reduced in weight near ly seven per cent. below the standard.
 If this happened when the difference in bullion value between standard coins of the two metals rarely exceed ed three per cent, what would happen now, when the bullion value of an eagle is almost twice as great as that of ten silver dollars? Mr Boies knows perfectly well that every one of our gold coins, now amounting to about five hundred and seventy million dol lars, would disappear from the treasury and from circulation. Instead of hay ing more real money" we would have less than half as much, while the pur- chasing power of each unit of the re- mainder would be greatly reduced and the credit money would suffer an equal depreciation.
 borrow gold when the vaults of the national treasury are literally swollen with the accumulation of hundreds upon hundreds of tons of silver, out of which it is just as lawful and just as right, under the constitution of this nation, to make money as it is to make it of gold?"
 This implies that +baea trh,,,, 5..l