Wheeling register. [volume] (Wheeling, W. Va.) 1878-1935, 1898-11-01

that ~ so DOING ne II conclusively prov
ing himself great nnancier also.
WHY BUSINESS MEN ARE GEasER-
ALLY ON THE GOLD SIDE-
The same. unfortunately. is, to some
out the country. Quite generally they as
sumo TO know all about the money ques-
ton merely because they are business
b ney s seem bp 70 b tnk Wheat Of corn
and sells 1t again, necessarily knows al
about the principles of monetary science,
while the man who raises the wnea5 ,b ano
principles and is not even capaoie Oh
learning. According to this line OF reas-
oning, the Italian with his go-eart on me
mess man. and knows all about
money, while the farmer VINO
"hayseed." There is another reason how
ever. why business men generally lean SO
strongly TO the gold standard In very
many , cases they 40 Il under ppeasg sse nn-
ton that the banker is man who knows
all about money, and in the second place,
they are generally under obligations TO
their banker and feel constrained 10 act
according to the latters wishes. 1 pre-
sumo that during the last political cam
pafgn there were thousands upon thous-
andS of cases in the United states IN
which business men were actually coerceu
into voting against their Better Juog meht
through fear of losing their credit at their
banks, while hundreds of thousands, per-
haps millions, of working men were IN
turn coerced by the fear OF losing tnelr
jobs. Now. the simple fact is that what
any man knows about the money question
does not depend at all upon the particular
kind of business which he happens to be
doing. All men who are engased IN any
sort of industry are business men, in
terested in the prices which they expeot
to get for whatever they nave TO sell,
whether it, be labor or some other KIND
n 1~,7N m nnOraSt
man who walks the streets OF one OF our
cities is just as much interested IN tnis
great question of money as the wealthlest
banker in London or New York. Indeed ne
is virtually more affected If the monetary
system be wrong, because under almost
any system the wealthy man can, to
great extent, protect himself, but the
very poor man is powerless, ana IN the
case of the latter very slight ehange
Of conditions. may reduce nm from q po-
stion of moderate comfort TO one OF alb
ject misery. 1t is strange circumstance
that the gold men generally claim TO De
in favor of that standard IN the interest,"
of the poor. and yet it is a noticeable fact
that the extreme advocates OF gold are
almost invariably rich men or in the em-
P1y of rich h men fa ana b simply sv Inc
poor man to have an honest dollar. SO
say we. We want the poor man to have
honest dollars and a good many of them:
The trouble with the gold standard and
its honest dollars is that the poor man
gets SO few of them. 1t is very small
cons,oi2 ton TO man 10 dd teii nun na1 now
has no flour in the house, not a nlcka
in his pocket and no prospect of getting
one. What he wants is q chance 70 earn earn
dominant features of distress which mas
followed the adoption of the gold stand
ard has been the extraordinary NUMBER OF
men who have been forced into idleness
and thus rendered incapable OF earning
any dollars at all. The fact that n few
men in certain organized industries have
Cd IN EGGrinQ their average
wage rate moderately well is no answer
to our contention upon this point. Wnat
we want a monetary system which VIII
create business conditions under which
every industrious man. every man VINO is
willing and anxious TO work, may nave
an opportunity TO do. so and receive
Just compensation for the work which he
performs.
POOR MEN MORE VITALITY CON
CERNED THAN RICH ONES.
If we look at this matter from a hu<
manitarian standpoint, the interests or
the laboring man are vastly greater than
those of the rich man, because as have
intimated a very little change means SO
the sweat of his brow. For example, let
us suppose that man is worth a million
of dollars and that he is engaged in the
he says that his interests are enormously
greater than those of the man who works
by the day, because those interests rep
resent SO many dollars. But we must
remember that dollars and all the instru-
mentalities OF modern civilization are only
intended 70 prom2te the happiness lIaness am, qhat
some monetary change is made by which
this man, worth a million dollars, loses
half million. He thinks that ne has sufe
fered a terrible injury, and so he has If
we measure it simply by dollars. But we
must bear in mind that he has still half
a million dollars left and that he is amply
able to provide for himself and his family
with every comfort and every luxury of
life. Now take the case OF the man wpo
labor one dollar. For a whole week his
earnings amount to only six dollars. II
a change takes place in the monetary sys-
tenn or in general business conditions by
or by which he loses three days work in
each week, which amounts to the same
ent. The six dollars a week which he was
receiving are just barely enough TO pro-
vide him and his family with the neces-
aries of life But when reduced TO three
absolute suffering Not only is a poor
man more vitality concerned with a ques-
5i9n cab sf fh of s Pa5 ee and Just
derstan1!ng it. He is far more likely
to approach the subject without bias ana
to consider it as broad question of prin
cple The man who already has large
wealth will find his judgment warped and
his vision blurred by what he believes to
question he asks himself in dealing with
some great economic proposition is how
will it affect my business and II is
fact very generally recognized that the
greatest and most powerful hinkers
which this world has ever produced have
been poor men whose whole lives were
struggles for bare existence and whose
greatness was only recognized long after
they had passed away X is not that the
poor man is more intelligent than the
rich one, but it is because the rich man
is completely absorbed in the details OF
his business counting the chances in ev-
cry individual, transaction, while the close.
hard student really has no time to make
money
SILVER MEN ARE NOT ATTACKING
HONEST WEALTH
The advocates of the gold standard
take a special delight in claiming that the
silver men are making indiscriminate
warfare upon wealth. That they look up
on every man who has acquired a compe-
tence as a criminal and would deprive
him of what he has acquired by superior
thrift or greater intelligence. My friends.
no greater libel was ever printed, no vlier
scandal ever spoken. In the ranks of the
silver forces human nature IS just the
same as IL is in those which are massed