The daily morning journal and courier., 1896-09-14

thing unless he could find some man who is going to Richmond and then he would have to wait till the man got back before he could get his money, and that might be the next week. An increase of the supply of dollars would not be to the interest of the north and east because the value of all vested in- 'terests would fall Our wealth is in dollars; If dollars increase the dollars would not be relatively of so much value But 1t would be perfectly fair, just as fair as it is to the owner of an orange grove to increase the supply of oranges.
 But how increase the supply of dol lars? If the free silver advocates could discover new mines of gold, new soy rces of supply, doing for dollars what the farmers did for wheat and corn when they opened the prairies of the west. If they could invent new methods of in- creasing the productiveness of the ex- isting sources, doing for dollars what the manufacturers with their machin- cry have done for goods, they would in reality increase the supply of dollars, and all men whose wealth is in some thing besides dollars would be relative gathers. But you can't increase the supply of dollars by merely calling things dollars. You can't increase the supply of dollars by calling fifty cent pieces dollars any more than you can increase the supply of wheat by calling one half bushel bushel. Of course everybody understands that to-day the weight of silver the Bryan party pro- pose to call a dollar is worth just fifty three cents. But the Bryan party claim that the manufacturing of this silver into dollars would so increase the de- mand for silver that that same weight of silver would become worth 100 cents, or as you see the oft reiterated news paper statement, silver would go to, $1.29 an ounce.
 Now it seems to me this Is the gist of the whole question If silver would go to $129 an ounce as Bryan claims then the free silver party is one of the great est that ever rose above humanity's horizon. In that case there would not be the opportunity to pay hundred dollar debt with fifty dollars, which many newspapers assume to be the di- rect object of Bryan's supporters, but there would be an appreciable increase in the number of honest dollars, which Is what the south and west truly need and may fairly fight for
 But what reason is there to suppose that silver would rise to S1.29 an ounce? There is not shred of reason in politi- cal economy or history to suppose that 1t would, and this the free silver lead CTS know as well as anybody else. Prac- tically there is not ope of them that would loan a thousand dollars to-day payable two years hence in anything but gold. The daily evidence of this is overwhelming. Politically some of them may dare to hope that by some miracle silver might become worth $1.29 an ounce, and for the rest they just dare to risk it.
 There is no economical reason why silver should go to $1.29 an ounce be- cause there Is another law as already noted regulating prices, besides supply and demand. namely, cost of produc- tion. Long before the price of silver reached $1.29 an ounce 1t would be prof itable to work twice as many mines as are worked to-day to say nothing of the stimulus given to the discovery of new mines and the invention of better ma chinery by the rise in value.
 Wheat is worth from fifty to eighty cents to-day. If it were known that wheat would be worth ninety cents next year there would be thousands upon thousands more acres laid down to wheat this fall If you could make all the farmers believe that it would be worth $1.50 you know the result. There would be so much wheat produc- ed it wouldn't be worth twenty-five cents There would be thousands of acres the reaper never would touch. Silver is worth seventy-cents an ounce to-day. Talk about going to $1,29! If it went to 80 you New Haveners would pawn your clothes and sell your wives wedding rings to go to digging it. There would be big money in it, and all the idle capital in the world would hasten to the work of it's production.
 And besides how would 1t be possible that we could escape having the sil- yer of the world unloaded on us to the extent we have got gold to buy it. A man that owed s10,000 could buy silver enough with 5000 in gold in any mark ct of the world to pay it. It is as if with wheat selling at from fifty to eighty cents round the world we should advertise that we would pay SIPS for it, wheat would come this way wouldn't it? And of course it wouldn't stay at that price through one call of the ex- change. The peculiarity of the money situation, the maddening, devilish- ness of confusion in it, is that money is not to be left to regulate itself as wheat would. but the government proposes to keep right on stamping fifty cents worth of silver a dollar and making it legal tender for dollar.
 It is the immortality of ignorance, the immortality of restless recklessness rather than the immortality of inten- tional fraud that you are called upon to resist, but is is immortality just the same.
 It is the irony of justice to reflect that in the event of a free silver victory the only men who would not suffer would be the holders of gold and gold -securi- ties.