Cameron County press. [volume] (Emporium, Cameron County, Pa.) 1866-1922, 1898-02-24
WAGES AND MONEY.
Facts which Knock ont the Pre-
lenses of Free SiIverites.

lenses of Free SiIverites.
A bond sale recently took place in
tkis state which shows the extent to
which the price of money has fallen
in the past few years. The bonds were
Missouri state securities, amounting
to $3j0,O00, bearing interest at four per
cent, and they sold at a premium.
These bonds are to take up bonds draw
ing six per cent. interest. Twenty
years ago the latter were hard to sell
at par, and they replaced bonds that
drew ten per cent. interest, which sold
for rs cents on the dollar in 1869, at a
time when the regular currency of the
country, greenbacks, which the repub-
licans brought up to the gold line in
1879, was worth only 75 cents on the dol
lar in gold. OF course the interest rate
for private loans in Missouri has also
fallen to nearly the same extent in this
time.
This is a little different sort of a
story from that which the silver orators
tell. They pretend that interest and
fixed charges for farmers and others
remain the same as during the war Pc
riod, while the prices of farm prod
ucts and the wages of labor have gone
down. The figures here given, how
ever, show that interest in Missouri is
much less than half as high as it was
25 or 30 years ago. Allowing for the
premium now on public bonds and the
discount then, the present rate of in
terest is only about a third what it
~
his friend Bryan, has often shed meta
phorical tears over the crime of 1873,
by which half of the country's money
was struck down and the value of the
other half enormously enhanced" Gov.
Stone and every other person in this
state, and in almost every other state,
no matter how poor or obscure, who has
acceptable sucurity to offer, can borrow
money for half what he would have had
to pay for it in 1879.
The facts knock out the rest of the sill
verites' pretense also. Prices of many
farm products have dropped in the pas;
20 years, though wheat at its present
price in 100-cent dollars is about as high
as it was 25 or 80 years ago, if the cur
rency of those days is reckoned on the
geld basis. Beef and pork have also
changed in price but slightly. On the
other hand, the farmers machinery and
tools, the interest on the money he bor-
rows. the price of the clothes he wears
and his general living expenses are in
the aggregate only about half what
they were at that time. That is to say,
the farmer has been a great gamer by
the change. The same is true, of course,
Of the average wageworker. An ex-
haustive examination made by the Unit
ed States commissioner of labor a few
years ago showed that dollar would
buy 27Ha per cent. more of the neces-
saries of life in 1891 than it would have
bought in 1872, a year before the great
'crime of the century" was perpe-
trated. and the average laborer got ten
Ler cent. more wages in 1891 than he did
in the earlier year. The thing the wage
worker had to SELL his LABOR, went UP III
price, and everything which he had to
buy went down. His condition has vast
ly improved in the past quarter of a cen
tury, and so has that of the farmer.
The deposits in the savings banks OF the
country and the reduction in the
amount of the farm mortgages are con-
elusive on both these points. st. Louis
G. G'obe-Democrat