The midland journal. (Rising Sun, Md.) 1885-1947, 1897-10-01
The Goldbug on Wheat in 80 and the
Same Bug in '07.

During the summer and fall of 1896 the
welkin rang from every village street in
the land with the voice of the goldbug
orators, crying to the laboring people to
shun the reconciliation of silver, which
was intended to raise prices and make his
wages purchase less. The goldbug orator,
with crocodile tears streaming from his
eyes, told the working men of the cities
that farmers wanted silver remonetized to
raise the price of their wheat, which
would make the wage laborer's bread dear
and the times harder for him.
Silver was not remonetized mainly be-
cause the 1aborers who work for wages
believed these goldbug orators and voted
to keep prices down by continuing an
ever approaching sound dollar. Nature
in the meantime interposed, causing a
failure of wheat crops in all the rest of
the world except North America, and this
worldwide scarcity of wheat has put the
price up to nearly double that it was when
these sympathizing goldbug friends of the
1aborers were lamenting in the latter's
behalf the rise in the price of the farmers
wheat. And now what are these professed
friends of the laboring man saying? They
are shouting themselves hoarse, and their
daily papers are using barrels ofink every
night in telling of the great prosperity
that has come out of a rise in the price of
the farmers wheat and in the price of the
laboring mans bread. Can these labor
ing men remember from one years end
to another? Or have they forgotten all
about what was told them about the
farmers wanting silver remonetized in
order to raise the price of their wheat
Will they put the two theories together
and understand that they were either lied
to last season or they are being humbug-
ged by the same parties and their news
papers this?
Wheat has gone up and the boards of
trade and stock gamblers of the large
cities are betting on the rise and causing
brisk times in sheol in the gamsters, but
has the idle laboring man found steady
employment or experienced rise in his
wages? Nothing of the kind has hap
pened, because every business man who
has sense enough left to hoist all umbrella
when it rains, knows that a rise in Amer
lean wheat caused by famine has no foun-
dalton for permanent increase in bus
mess. But were the minis opened to the
free coinage of silver a steady stream OF
new money would increase trade and Gre
ate not only rise in prices of every pro-
duct of industry, but would start new lines
of business and make demsnd for more
labor, whose wages would rise with the
universal advance in the price of the conf
modities labor created. If the price OF
things labor produces does not rise wages
cannot advance.
The present temporary rise of wheat
caused by famine crops in Europe and
Asia will not put any new money into
circulation and of course cannot create
and sustain an enlargement of industries,
the advance in wheat will merely take
lIOuL lhC pllSC Vi OtASA PlOhuNbo anu dNNi
to the price of grain, there being no more
money added to the volume which pur-
chases and distributes the annual pro-
ducts, none of those products can rise
abnormally without curtailing the price
of others. If this wheat rise serves to
cause spasmodic energy to business it
will be at the expense of business i'll the
future, as drink of whiskey calls into
activity the latent energy of a man whose
physical powers suffer by corresponding
ebb, and when the stimulus is exhausted
the physical powers of the victim sink
below the normal as far as it was stim-
ulated above
If the laboring men and farmers hope
to experience prosperity that will last
they must cut loose from the gold STAN
dard. There is nothing but lower prices,
idleness and poverty for them i'll its trail.
That is its history since it began, quar-
ter of a century ago, to stealthily steal on
our people. 1t is its history in the British
nation, in Germany and everywhere its
whitening blight has ever appeared.