Our Presidents and how we make them

by Alexander K. McClure

On this issue we declare ourselves to be in favor of a distinctive American financial system. We are unalterably opposed to the single gold standard, and demand the immediate return to the constitutional standard of gold and silver, by the restoration by this Government, independently of any foreign power, of the unrestricted coinage of both gold and silver into standard money, at the ratio of sixteen to one, and upon terms of exact equality, as they existed prior to 1873; the silver coin to be of full legal tender, equally with gold, for all debts and dues, public and private; and we demand such legislation as will prevent for the future the destruction of the legal tender quality of any kind of money by private contract.

We hold that the power to control and regulate a paper currency is inseparable from the power to coin money, and hence that all currency intended to circulate as money should be issued, and its volume controlled, by the General Government only, and should be a legal tender.

We are unalterably opposed to the issue by the United States of interest-bearing bonds in time of peace, and we denounce as a blunder worse than a crime the present treasury policy, concurred in by a Republican House of Representatives, of plunging the country into debt by hundreds of millions in the vain attempt to maintain the gold standard by borrowing gold; and we demand the payment of all coin obligations of the United States as provided by existing laws, in either gold or silver coin, at the option of the Government, and not at the option of the creditor.

The demonetization of silver in 1873 enormously increased the demand for gold, enhancing its purchasing power and lowering all prices measured by that standard; and, since that unjust and indefensible act, the prices of American products have fallen, upon an average, nearly fifty per cent., carrying down with them proportionately the money value of all other forms of property.

Such fall of prices has destroyed the profits of legitimate industry, injuring the producer for the benefit of the non-producer; increasing the burden of the debtor, swelling the gains of the creditor, paralyzing the productive energies of the American people, relegating to idleness vast numbers of willing workers, sending the shadows of despair into the home of the honest toiler, filling the land with tramps and paupers, and building up colossal fortunes at the money centres.

In the effort to maintain the gold standard, the country has, within the last two years, in a time of profound peace and plenty, been loaded down with $262,000,000 of additional interest-bearing debt under such circumstances as to allow a syndicate of native and foreign bankers to realize a net profit of millions on a single deal.

It stands confessed that the gold standard can be only upheld by so depleting our paper currency as to force the prices of our products below the European, and even below the Asiatic, level to enable us to sell in foreign markets, thus aggravating the very evils of which our people so bitterly complain, degrading American labor and striking at the foundations of our civilization itself.

The advocates of the gold standard persistently claim that the real cause of our distress is overproduction—that we have produced so much that it made us poor—which implies that the true remedy is to close the factory, abandon the farm, and throw a multitude of people out of employment—a doctrine that leaves us unnerved and disheartened, and absolutely without hope for the future.

We affirm it to be unquestioned that there can be no such economic paradox as overproduction, and at the same time tens of thousands of our fellow-citizens remaining half clothed and half fed, and piteously clamoring for the common necessities of life.

Over and above all other questions of policy, we are in favor of restoring to the people of the United States the time-honored money of the Constitution—gold and silver, not one, but both—the money of Washington and Hamilton and Jefferson and Monroe and Jackson and Lincoln, to the end that the American people may receive honest pay for an honest product; that the American debtor may pay his just obligations in an honest standard, and not in a dishonest and unsound standard, appreciated one hundred per cent. in purchasing power, and no appreciation in debt-paying power; and to the end, further, that silver standard countries may be deprived of the unjust advantage they now enjoy, in the difference in exchange between gold and silver, an advantage which tariff legislation cannot overcome.