Manchester Democrat. [volume] (Manchester, Iowa) 1875-1930, 1917-09-26
SILVER WORTH MORE THAN GOLD
AT RATIO OF IS TO 1.

It is with no small degree of salts
faction, that we note the fact that sill
yer is now nearly ten per cent. more
valuable than gold at the historic
ratio.
Those who were readers of this pa
per twenty or. more years ago will
recollect how vigorously it protested
against the decentralization of silver.
How it truthfully characterized the
change to a single gold standard as
gigantic crime against the debtor
classes and all wealth producers. 1t
was all that and much more.
There are no words in the English
language sufficiently potential to prop
erE describe the injustice, the misery
and the human suffering wrought by
the gamblers in wealth, when they
shortened the money measures of the
chief commercial nations of the world,
by making gold the only legal meas
ure of values.
Many billions of dollars of indebt-
edness, contracted when both gold
and silver were legal tender money,
had to be paid when gold, and gold
alone, was the only unlimited legal
money measure Paid when it took
nearly twice as much labor to earn
dollar as it would have taken had the
double money standard prevailed.
Again and again this paper assured
the scarce money schemers that their
unfair advantage over the producing
masses, under the single gold STAN
dard, would not be lasting. That while
unconscionable and for time advan-
tageous to them, their scheme would
return like boomerang to blast its
authors.
Here is one of the illustrations used
by this paper more than twenty years
ago:
Suppose that all debts were pay
able HI either bushels Of corn or bush
els of oats, instead of in gold dollars
or silver dollars And suppose that
the men to whom these debts were pay
able secured the passage of law
making all of them payable in corn
and corn alone. What would have
been the first effect of such change?
Would not the value of corn have nearly
doubled? Would not the price of oats
have declined nearly one-half? Would
not such change have been the equiva-
lent of a robbery of the man who had
to get the high priced corn to pay his
debt? -. De-,
The second effect of such a change,
if corn instead of gold was made the
sole measure of values, would have
been the righting of the wrong in
single year, because all of the oat
fields would have been planted to corn
the year following the change But
the mining Of gold and silver is not
like the growing of annual crops. Ev-
cry silver miner could not change his
silver mine into gold mine. Neither
could he Become gold miner as
readily as a farmer could change his
crops. But the trend away from sill
, yer mining was assured, because the
price of silver when deprived of its
money attribute, was certain to fall,
( and it did fall until it was worth less
than so cents per ounce. An increase
in gold mining was inevitable, be-
cause gold was made doubly valuable,
and men could earn more mining
gold than they could mining silver, or
farming, or doing other kinds of work.
It required no exceptional degree
of foresight to know that what has
happened would happen; and yet
the men who predicted that ere long
16 ounces of silver would be worth as
much intrinsically as one ounce OF
gold, were called lunatics by the dupes
of the scarce money schemers.
In it's last analysis labor is the
foundation upon which all money
measures rest. When new or increas-
ed uses are found for anything, its
price advances and it's production in
creases. Labor, the great leveler of
values, continues to increase the pro-
duction of high priced articles until
their price is, lowered to the general
level. That is what has happened,
what had to happen, in the production