The daily morning journal and courier., 1896-10-23
SEARCH LIGHT or TRUTH
(Contlnued from First Page.)

choose. The excited orators who are traversing the land in every direction vexing the ears of the people with a reiteration of the statement that there is some party or some body of men in this country denying the right of authority of the United States to change it's monetary system without the consent of some other nation, are simply evading the real questions at is- sue and misrepresenting the position or their opponents for the purpose of making unworthy appeals to the pas sions and prejudices of the audiences. The question is not whether the United States alone have the power to adopt free coinage and silver monometallism, but whether, in view of our own do- nestle conditions and interests, and of our extensive commercial and financial relations with the other great civilized nations of the world it would be good policy and good faith to make such radical change in our currency and such a wholesale repudiation of our ob- legations It is not @ question of power; it is not a question of national independence, but it is a question of national prosperity and national hon. or"
 Secretary Carlisle proceeded to dis cuss at length the economic effects of free silver coinage. "The advocates ad- Vanced three distinct and wholly in consistent propositions" he said. "Their first proposition is that free coinage at ratio of 16 to 1 will give the people cheap money, but it will reduce the value of the dollar about one-half, SO that 1t will require about twice as many dollars to produce a given quan- tityt of commodities as are required now. This is the high price argument, and is addressed to the farmers and so-called debtor classes. The sec ond proposition is that free coinage will not make cheap or depreciated money, but will raise the value of a silver dol lar to an equality with the present value of the gold dollar, and of course it requires no argument to convince an intelligent audience that, if this is true, prices will be no higher than they are now, and producers and dealers will get no more dollars than they get now.
 Driven away from the advocacy of the first proposition in many parts of the country by reason of its manifest and gross injustice to the laboring man, the depositors in savings banks and other institutions, and to creditors generally, and forced by the unreason- able arguments of their opponents in other parts of the country to abandon the second on account of it's demon strated absurdity, they have resorted to the third as a compromise between the advocates of absolute fiatism and the advocates of partial or modified G1A . 1+,,,r rN,1s-1 -1o ''the contention that the United States alone can, by the free coinage of sil- yer, increase the value of that metal and also reduce the value of gold sim ply doubles the difficulties which our opponents have encountered in this discussion To believe that the free coinage by the United States alone would accomplish either of these re- suits requires a faith in fiatism which would remove mountains: but to be- lieve that 1t would accomplish both exhibits degree of incredulity unpar- allied in the annals of human affairs. ,
 Taking up in detail each of these three propositions, MT. Carlisle went on to show how the law of supply and de- mand and the recorded experience of the world for at least six centuries re- futed each of them.
 ITO protect themselves against the evil effects of threatened depreciation of their money and to enable them to maintain the parity of their silver and gold coins already in use, Holland, France Belgium, Italy, Switzerland, Greece and Venezuela have all been compelled since the year 1875 to sus- pend the coinage of legal tender silver. Spain was forced also to stop the coin- age in 1873, except on government ac- counts, and in 1893 the government of British India, silver monometallic country, after an exhaustive examina- tion of the subject in all it's aspects, suspended the coinage on individual account for the avowed purpose of pre- venting the further fall of the silver rupee and esta blishing fixed par of exchange with London and other finan- cial centers in Europe, but according to the free silver advocates the states men and financiers of all these coun- tries moved in exactly the wrong direc- ton and if they had wanted to main- tain parity or to establish parity they ought to have opened their hints to the free coinage of all the silver in the world instead of closing them.
 'The increased coinage of legal ten der silver at a ratio which over-valued that metal relatively to gold, would not diminish the demand for gold any where or determine the struggle for it's possession, but would greatly increase the demand and intensity the struggle, because if two kinds of money of the same denomination, but of unequal value were in existence everybody would strive to get the most valuable, and as the number of silver dollars in- creased their value relatively to gold would increase.
 ''If,'' he continued, i've want to in- crease the price of food and clothing and other necessaries of life without increasing the demand for them or diminishing the supply, we must put on more taxes and erect more barriers between the producer and consumer, and we must turn back the advancing tide of scientific and industrial pro- gress. We must abandon our railroads, steamships, telegraphs and telephones, and go back to the old road wagon and stage coach on land, to the sailing ves- sel on the water, and conduct our social and business intercourse through the slow and expensive process of mail