Pine to Potomac

by E. K. Cressey

3. “That silver dollars or silver bullion, assayed and mint-stamped, may be deposited with the assistant treasurer at New York, for which coin-certificates may be issued, the same in denomination as United States notes, not below ten dollars, and that these shall be redeemable on demand in coin or bullion, thus furnishing a paper-circulation based on an actual deposit of precious metal, giving us notes as valuable as those of the Bank of England and doing away at once with the dreaded inconvenience of silver on account of bulk and weight.”

He cites an exclusively gold nation like England, which, while it may have some massive fortunes, shows also the most hopeless and helpless poverty in the humblest walks of life. But France, a gold-and-silver nation, while it can exhibit no such fortunes as England boasts, presents “a people who, with silver savings, can pay a war indemnity that would have beggared the gold-bankers of London, and to which the peasantry of England could not have contributed a pound sterling in gold, nor a single shilling in silver.”

Mr. Blaine’s sense of justice, and national honor, and national pride were injured by making a dollar which, in effect, was not a dollar,—was not worth a hundred cents.

“Consider, further,” he says, “what injustice would be done to every holder of a legal-tender or national-bank note. That vast volume of paper-money—over seven hundred millions of dollars—is now worth between ninety-eight and ninety-nine cents on the dollar in gold coin. The holders of it, who are indeed our entire population, from the poorest to the wealthiest, have been promised, from the hour of its issue, that the paper-money would one day be as good as gold. To pay silver for the greenback is a full compliance with this promise and this obligation, provided the silver is made as it always has been hitherto, as good as gold. To make our silver coin even three per cent. less valuable than gold, inflicts at once a loss of more than twenty millions of dollars on the holders of our paper-money. To make a silver dollar worth but ninety-two cents, precipitates on the same class a loss of well-nigh sixty millions of dollars. For whatever the value of the silver dollar is, the whole paper issue of the country will sink to its standard when its coinage is authorized and its circulation becomes general in the channels of trade.

“Some one in conversation with Commodore Vanderbilt during one of the many freight competitions of the trunk lines, said, ‘Why, the Canadian road has not sufficient carrying capacity to compete with your great line!’

“‘That is true,’ replied the Commodore, ‘but they can fix a rate and force us down to it.’

“Were congress to pass a law to-day, declaring that every legal-tender note and every national-bank note shall hereafter pass for only ninety-six or ninety-seven cents on the dollar, there is not a constituency in the United States that would re-elect a man that should support it, and in many districts the representative would be lucky if he escaped with merely a minority vote.”

Mr. Blaine’s sympathies in this discussion were with the people, and although he had passed out of that popular branch of congress, as it is called, most nearly connected with them, he could not in any sense be divorced from them, and so, although before men of great wealth, his plea was for the laboring class,—for those who made the country strong and rich,—and so in continuing his speech he pleaded for them; and it will bring them nearer to him to-day to recall his strong and earnest words, which, even in the staid and formal senate, with its infinite courtesies and conservative venerations, has a heart to smile, and good cheer sufficient to applaud, as they did this close of his hard-money speech. These were his final utterances:—

“The effect of paying the labor of this country in silver coin of full value, as compared with irredeemable paper,—or as compared, even, with silver of inferior value,—will make itself felt in a single generation to the extent of tens of millions—perhaps hundreds of millions—in the aggregate savings which represent consolidated capital. It is the instinct of man from the savage to the scholar—developed in childhood, and remaining with age—to value the metals which in all tongues are called precious.

“Excessive paper-money leads to extravagance, to waste, and to want, as we painfully witness on all sides to-day. And in the midst of the proof of its demoralizing and destructive effect, we hear it proclaimed in the halls of congress, that ‘the people demand cheap money.’ I deny it. I declare such a phrase to be a total misapprehension—a total misinterpretation of the popular wish. The people do not demand cheap money. They demand an abundance of good money, which is an entirely different thing. They do not want a single gold standard that will exclude silver, and benefit those already rich. They do not want an inferior silver standard that will drive out gold, and not help those already poor. They want both metals, in full value, in equal honor, in whatever abundance the bountiful earth will yield them to the searching eye of science, and to the hard hand of labor.