The Salt Lake herald. [volume] (Salt Lake City [Utah]) 1870-1909, 1897-11-17
CITIZEN ON MONETARY STAND
ARDS.

Robert Giffen, the great English au-
thority on finance and kindred mat
tiers, has been writing on monetary
standards. He has much to say about
the money question in the United
States. He SAYS that in all the his
tory of money there has been no such
period of discredit as has prevailed in
the United States for the past ten
years. The credit of the government,
which, he says, ought to stand highest,
or as high as any, in the world, mas
been shaken. A community, he goes
on to say, which has occasion to bor-
row abroad largely for its necessary
development has had the wells of for
eign capital dried UP. Business has
been stopped, he says, because people
withdrew deposits from the banks,
fearing to be paid in an inferior metal,
and because they were afraid for q
similar reason to give credit in daily
affairs That the United States COM
mercial community has survived with
out a more complete collapse, and that
business of late has begun to pick up
extraordinary natural resources and
vitality of the people, says Mr.. Giffen.
But the losses have been enormous,
and the full tale can never be told of
the social distress and misery through
which the speople have passed because
of the doubt of their standard money
ITO make things worse, monetary
neutrality-suspicious. Of the most subtle
and complicated kind-have been made
the battle ground of party politics.
Wherever there is parliamentary gov
eminent there will probably be cur
rency faddists to the fore. but it has
been reserved for the United States in
recent years to see the faddist a great
power in the land, and the whole sub
ject of money discussed by the litter
ate and partly educated, without
knowledge of the facts as to the pro-
duction or use of gold and silver, and
equally without knowledge of the prin-
ciples of money. The bimetallic agi-
tators in the United States are respon-
sible for thus finging monetary ques-
tons into the gutter and exciting the
passions of the populace about money
a crime of great turpitude, and which
can only be excused on the score. of
their own ignorance. 1 am not sure
that our bimetallists in England are
nearly as guilty. If their success had
equaled their viii, we might have been
as badly off"
The currency agitation in this coun-
try has been too long and those who
have been engaged in it have been too
intensely in earnest to call that agita-
ton fad or the agitators faddists
The bimetallic agitators have not flung
monetary questions into the gutter.
All the bimetallists have not the same
profound knowledge Of the facts as to
the production of gold and silver that
Mr.. Giffen has. but they have very
clear and fixed ideas as to their proper
use, though they undoubtedly differ
from those held by Mr.. Giffen.
He further says that much trouble
would have been spared the English
government, and much discredit
avoided, had Englands public men de-
clared in 1878, when they were first
asked to a bimetalhc conference, that
the English system of money was
based, in their opinion, on absolutely
sound principles which they could not
and would not suffer to be questioned,
believing, as they did, that other ma
tons had TO learn from the English,
and not the English from them.
We ourselves wish that England had
given the answer to the proposal for