The United States Government reserves to itself the right under the constitution, to coin and issue the money to be used by its own people.
Formerly we had two standards of value, gold and silver, or bimetalism.
If gold and silver were produced in relatively equal quantities, the world would go on trading with money of both kinds, but the proportions are not the same.
Among the Aztecs and Peruvians silver ranked with gold as two to one, that is, two pounds of silver would purchase as much as one pound of gold.
But when great silver mines were discovered and new methods were discovered for extracting the metal, it became more and more abundant, till it depreciated far below the former value it had in its relation to gold.
Most of the commercial nations decided to have but one standard of value, and that gold, long before the United States fell into line.
Our money measure is known as the decimal, or metric. It would be convenient, if we could follow the example of nearly all the other commercial nations, and use the metric system for all our weights and measures.
OUR METAL MONEY
In the United States Treasury at Washington, there are many million dollars in silver coins and bullion.
The gold standard has not driven silver out of circulation, for it is still found convenient to use it in settling immediately our smaller business transactions.