The Yale expositor., 1896-05-01
INCOMES AND FREE SILVER
All Who Labor VIII Find Their Wages
Cut i'm Half by tho Silver Dollar.

sons OF fixed incomes.
This is true, but in a sense broader
thar. it's authors intended. Persons OF
tiXeS incomes are not merely million
aires, army, or navy officers. All who la
Dor in this country, whether the pay be
called salary or wages, are also per-
sons of fixed incomes, and they decided
~ object to having their incomes cut
in half for the benefit of the silver mine
owners.
The blacksmith who makes SIS a
week, the carpenter at So per day, the
salesman at $1,000 year. the agricul-
tural laborer at $3.50 day, the teacher
at SO a week, are all persons of fixed
incomes. They find their incomes none
too large for their necessities. Why
should they not object to a slump to
silver, free and unlimited, for the bene-
fit of those who own silver, but at a
loss of so per cent in their fixed IN
comes?
1t is the labor of the country that
most determinedly demands the gold
basis: that demands stability in the
currency; that objects most positively
to loss of half it's fixed income.
Silver mine owners and agents must
reckon with this element, and it is a
mighty element at the ballot box. Let
platform writer's note this fact as we'll
as silver mine capitalists" Chicago
Times Herald.
1t is almost a waste of time to COM
ment upon anything that appears in
the Chicago Times-Herald with refer
ence to the silver question. If there is
a statement against silver so wild, so
homogeneous, so absurd and so utterly
false as not to find place in the edi-
torial columns of that paper, it can only
be because the financial editor has not
happened to think of it. If somebody
should suggest to him that the free
coinage If silver would convert the
seventeen year locusts into an annual
pest, or interfere with the orderly pre-
cision of the equinoxes, we may be
sure that the idea would speedily APP
pear in the columns of that paper, with
all the gorgeous coloring that lurid
imagination could supply.
Still there is now and then a person
who may possibly be misled by the
very boldness of the Times-Herald
statements.
Doubtless this is the theory of the
Sound Currency Committee of the Re-
form Club, for the above article ap-
IN, nf
Elements, which are being scattered
broadcast over the country.
The idea sought to be conveyed is that
all wage workers have fixed incomes. !"
That is, no matter how greatly the
prices of houses and everything else
in which the carpenter work is done
may fall, the carpenter is still going
to get the same pay. No matter how
much or how little the employer gets
for shooting horses or making wagons,
the blacksmith's pay will remain un-
changed, though the merchants pro-
fits may be destroyed and he be forced
into bankruptcy by the fall in the prices
of his goods, the salesman will still
draw his 1000 year.
If the farmers wheat drops to %
cents, his corn to 1919, his oats to g..
and his potatoes to nothing at all, the
farm hand is still going to receive his
monthly pay undiminished.
Such is the philosophy of the Times
Herald, and by adoption, of the Sound
Money" Committee.
1t is hard to say whether we should
smile at the absurdity, or become indig-
nant at the bare-faced fraud. Perhaps
it would be as well to treat it with ST.
lent contempt, for there is not an intel
ligent workingman in the country who
can be deceived by anything so fiimsy
and false.
The average workingman knows per-
fectly well that his employers ability
to pay him his wages depends upon
the price obtained for the product of
his labor. He knows that the state
ment that his pay is fixed" is abso-
lutely false. Every day some great es
adjustment either limits production or
cuts wages because of the low prices of
products.
he knows that prices are lower than
ever before, and that there is more
idleness, poverty and suffering extant
than at any previous period in our
country's history.
If there is workingman in the coun-
try who honestly believes in the gold
standard, the character of the argu-
ments (?) by which it Is defended
should quickly convince him of his err
ror.
The statement that the incomes of
the blacksmith, the carpenter, the
salesman and the agricultural laborer
are fixed is an insult to the intelligence
of 20,000,000 of American workingmen.
There is another idea involved that
is equally preposterous and equally
false.
1t is that under free coinage the work.
ingman would get no more dollars than
he does now, and each dollar would
only be worth fifty cents.
That is impossible. The only way
free coinage can make dollars cheaper
is by making them more plentiful. IL
thew become more abundant then the