Once the peace of the world was shattered by this absurd question: Was the male or the female faculty the first cause of the universe? There was no answer, for man himself had invented the riddle; nevertheless what one believed about it was more important than life, happiness or civilization. Proponents of the male principle adopted the color white. Worshippers of the female principle took for their sign and symbol the color red, inclining to yellow. Under these two banners there took place a religious warfare which involved all mankind, dispersed, submerged and destroyed whole races of people and covered Asia, Africa and Europe with tragic ruins. Then someone accidentally thought of a third principle which reconciled those two and human sanity was restored on earth. All this is now forgotten.
Since then people have been mad together about a number of things,—God, tulips, witches, definitions, alchemy and vanities of precept. In 1894 they were mad about money,—not about the use, possession and distribution of it, but as to the color of it, whether it should be silver,—that is to say, white like the symbol of those old worshippers of the masculine faculty, or gold,—that is, red inclining to yellow, as was the symbol of those who in the dimness of human history adored the feminine faculty.
And as people divided on this question of silver or gold they became utterly delirious. Either side was willing to see the government’s credit ruined, as it very nearly was, for the vindication of a fetich. They did not know it. They had not the remotest notion why or how they were mad because they were unable to realize that they were mad at all.
I have recently turned over the pages of the newspapers and periodicals of that time to verify the recollection that events as they occurred were treated with no awareness of their significance. And it was so. Intelligence was in suspense. The faculty of judgment slept as in a dream; the imagination ran loose, inventing fears and phantasies. That the government stood on the verge of bankruptcy or that the United States Treasury was about to shut up under a run of panic-stricken gold hoarders was regarded not as a national emergency in which all were concerned alike, but as proof that one theory was right and another wrong, so that one side viewed the imminent disaster gloatingly and was disappointed at its temporary postponement, while the other resorted to sophistries and denied self-evident things.
Nor does anyone know to this day why people were then mad. Economists write about it as the struggle for sound money (gold), against unsound money (silver), and that leaves it where it was. Money is not a thing either true or untrue. It is merely a token of other things which are useful and enjoyable. Both silver and gold are sound for that purpose. Their use is of convenience, and the proportions and quantities in which they shall circulate as currency is rationally a matter of arithmetic. Yet here were millions of people emotionally crazed over the question of which should be paramount, one side talking of the crime of dethroning silver and the other of the gold infamy.
ii
All other business having come to a stop while this matter was at an impasse, a truce was effected in this wise by law: Gold should remain paramount, nominally, but the Treasury should buy each month a great quantity of silver bullion, turn it into white money, force the white money into circulation and then keep it equal to gold in value. Now, the amount of precious metal in a silver dollar was worth only half as much as the amount of precious metal in a gold dollar. Yet Congress decreed that gold and silver dollars should be interchangeable and put upon the Treasury a mandate to keep them equal in value. How? By what magic? Why, by the magic of a phrase. The phrase was: “It is the established policy of the United States to maintain the two metals at a parity with each other by law.”
Naïve trust in the power of words to command reality is found in all mass delusions.
The Coxeyites were laughed at for thinking that prosperity could be created by phrases written in the form of law. Congress thought the same thing. It supposed that the economic distress in the country could be cured by making fifty cents’ worth of silver equal to one hundred cents’ worth of gold, and that this miracle of parity could be achieved by decree.
Anyone would know what to expect. The gold people ran with white dollars to the Treasury and exchanged them for gold and either hoarded the gold or sold it in Europe. In this way the government’s gold fund was continually depleted, and this was disastrous because its credit, the nation’s credit in the world at large, rested on that gold fund. It sold bonds to buy more gold, but no matter how fast it got more gold into the Treasury even faster came people with white money to be redeemed in money the color of red inclining to yellow, and all the time the Treasury was obliged by law to buy each month a great quantity of silver bullion and turn it into white money, so that the supply of white money to be exchanged for gold was inexhaustible.