If the toilers of this country, from the proceeds of whose labor these exactions have to be paid, had as little influence on the legislation of the United States as the toilers of England have on the legislation of that country, the creditor classes and financiers of the United States might be as frank as those of Great Britain in admitting the object of maintaining the single gold standard.
How graphically, though unintentionally, does the English poet, Waller, in the following verse, express the advantage which the gold standard gives to creditors everywhere, and the self-satisfaction with which they contemplate life:
The taste of hot Arabia's spice we know,
Free from the scorching sun that makes it grow.
Without the worm, in Persia's silk we shine,
And, without planting, drink of every vine.
To dig for wealth we weary not our limbs,
Gold, though the heaviest metal, hither swims.
Ours is the harvest where the Indians mow.
We plow the deep, and reap what others sow.
THE MOTIVE OF GERMANY.
When Germany, intoxicated by her victory over France, and in order to further cripple a fallen foe from whom she had exacted $1,000,000,000 in gold, demonetized silver, she inflicted on her people by the fall of prices consequent on the increase in the value of money, more misery than all her armies of horse and foot had been able to inflict on France. France, on the contrary, notwithstanding this unprecedented war tribute, by keeping a sufficient volume of money in circulation to maintain, and even advance, her range of prices, emerged in a few years from the consequences of the greatest disaster in her history, conscious of a triumph more complete than Germany had achieved by all the military splendor of the war. The ransom exacted of France was received back by her almost as soon as paid, in exchange for the products of her industry. It is not a sign of prosperity, Mr. President, when hundreds of thousands of people, the best bone and sinew of a nation, are found annually emigrating; and it is a coincidence which I merely mention, in passing, that as soon as the effects of demonetization of silver had had time to make themselves felt in Germany, a veritable hegira of its people took place.
From 1873 to 1889, the emigration from Germany numbered 1,546,000 persons.
Students of social science everywhere recognize the statistics of illegitimacy and of suicides as among the most powerful evidences of monetary distress. By reference to those statistics we find that notwithstanding the large emigration during that period the number of illegitimate births in Germany increased from 161,294 in 1883 to 169,645 in 1888. The suicides in Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony, and Baden—the leading states of the German Empire—increased from 179 for each million of population in 1868 to 196 for each million of the population in 1876 and to 218 for each million of the population in 1882. In Prussia alone the number of suicides in 1876 was 151 per million, while in 1882 it was 191 per million.
This is part of the price which the toiling masses of Germany are paying for the gold standard experiment, which, without their consent their imperial government foisted upon them.
Bismarck made the mistake that many able men in all countries of the western world have made and continue to make, namely, that of attributing the commanding position of Great Britain in the commercial and industrial world to her adoption of the gold standard. Bismarck mistook for cause and effect what was a mere coincidence, the result of exceptional conditions, as did those of our legislators in 1873, who happened to know anything whatever of the nature of the act demonetizing silver. The belief of some of the most far-sighted statesmen of Great Britain has been that she secured her position, not by reason of the gold standard, but in spite of it.
In a speech delivered at Glasgow, in November, 1873, after the alteration by Germany in her monetary standard, Mr. Disraeli said: