The daily morning journal and courier., 1896-08-28

question Iurlnef. l am qulIe us lnucH opposed to cheapening the American Workingman and working women as am to cheapening our dollars. l am quite as strongly in favor of keeping work at home as am gold dollars. If it could be known tonight that the gallant soldier, that typical American, that distinguished and use full statesman, William Mckinley, of Ohio, (applause and cheering) would certainly be elected president, how the bears would take to cover on the stock exchange tomorrow.
 My friends, as a republican, I am proud of many things, but l can sum up as the highest satisfaction I have had in the party and it's career, that the prospect of republican success never did disturb business. In connection with this financial matter do we all realize how important the choice of presi- dent is? Do you know that as the law is now without the passage of any free coinage of silver at all it is in the power of the president to bring the business of this country to a silver basis. All he has to do is to let the gold reserve oOy u pely Cut oilNSl NllCll llltu ttOh lOl gold and we are there already It is only because each of the presidents of the United States that we have had and the one we have now-has regarded 1t under the law as his public duty to maintain the gold basis, maintaining that parity between our silver and gold coins which the law declares is the policy of the government and because he has had the courage to execute the powers given to him by the resump- tion act to carry out that declaration of public law. I undertake, therefore, to say that if MT. Bryan or man holding his views were in the presidential chair without any legislation by congress we should be on a silver basis in week $ time. (Applause.)
 Three or four years ago, when I was in New York, some one of these report CTS, who sometimes hear things that are not intended for them, got hold of remark of mine about the wild horses that MT. Cleveland had to handle, and l simply meant by that what has been demonstrated that he did not have a compact or solidified party back of him; that the democratic party in con- gress represented every shade of every ism that had ever been propounded in the country, and that he could not manage it. My prophecy has become a verity. They have left him. They abandoned him, and now, as tfat eau tion was meant to indicate That we needed to look out after our congress as well as our president, this caution is intended to show you at this time that we need to look after our presi- dent if we would avoid the calamity of having this country put upon the Mex ican basis of money.
 The silver question-what is 1t? Do we want silver because we want more money, a, larger circulating medium? {? 1 have not heard anybody say so. Mir Bryan Is not urging it upon that basis. If anybody were to seek to give that as a reason for wanting free silver, he would be very soon confounded by the statement that free silver would put more gold out of circulation tban the hints of the United States could possi- ply bring in in years of silver, and that instead of having more money we would have less. (Applause.) With
 
 gold driven out of circulation, we will reduce the per capita money of this country between eight and nine dol- lars. So it is not for more money We have an abundant supply of cir culating medium-gold, silver, national bank notes, greenbacks. treasury notes and fractional silver We have some thing like s23 per capita of our popula- tion. What Is there, then, that creates the demand for silver? It is openly avowed. It Is not more dollars, but cheaper dollars, that are wanted. It is lower standard of value that they are demanding. They say gold has gone up until it has ceased to be a prop CT standard of value, and they want silver. But how do they want It? Now, my friends, there is a great deal of talk about bimetallism and the double standard and a great deal of confusion in the use of those terms. Bimetallism is the use of the two metals as money, where both are standard.
 By double standard they mean that we shall have gold dollar and a silver dollar which shall be units of value, by which all property and all wages and everything is to be measured. Now, our fathers thought that when they used these two metals in coinage they must determine the intrinsic rela- tive value of the two so that compar- ison of the markets of the world would show just what relation one ounce of silver bore to one ounce of gold in the markets of the world where gold and silver were used and they carefully went about ascertaining that.
 Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton gave their great powers to the determination of that question and they collected the market reports and they studied with all their power that question and when they had found what appeared to be the general and average relative value of these two metals they fixed upon the ratio be- tween them. Now what was the ob7 ject of all that? Why did they lump it all? Because they fully understood that unless these dollars were of the same inherent intrinsic value both of them could not be standards of value, and both could not circulate. (Ap- plause.)
 Why, every boy knows that it is es- sential that the length of his stilts be- low the tread shall be the same. What is the law that governs here? It is just this simple law of human sel- fishness and self-protection, that if you have two things, either one of which