France has an area less than that of Texas by some 60,000 square miles, yet its aggregate wealth is two-thirds that of the United States; and on the basis of assessed value her agricultural wealth is very much greater than ours. Mulhall, the great British statistician, says of France that she is “the best cultivated country in Europe.” Her 6,000,000 peasant proprietors are the owners of nearly all her cultivatable soil, which is worth, on an average, $160 per acre. She has over 400,000 miles of the finest common roads in the world, which have cost her, at the ordinary rate of labor, over $5,000,000,000. Their benefit goes chiefly to agriculture, binding the farmers of different provinces and farmers and city dwellers together. She has over 10,000 miles of canals and canalized rivers; she has 25,000 miles of railways, all in the highest state of efficiency. She has, during her bimetallic period, become the second colonial power of the world, and has acquired foreign territory at such a rate as to excite the jealousy of England. She has become the second naval power on the globe, and the second exporting nation, her exports averaging some $900,000,000 per year, an amount larger than the exports from this country, which has a population nearly double that of France, nearly all of it being manufactures; and had the same rate of growth continued as was maintained before France became monometallic, it is fair to presume that her exports at this time would have equalled those of Great Britain. Best of all, the great increase of wealth is in the hands of those who created it. It is the universal testimony of all observers that the condition of the French people and the general aspect of France has steadily improved throughout this century. It is a country in which poor-houses are unknown; in her cities a beggar is a curiosity. In their country’s emergency the common people came forward and out of their savings paid $1,000,000,000 accumulated during the bimetallic period. Despite the loss of $240,000,000 in the Panama Canal and of $1,000,000,000 in the indemnity to Germany, as well as two of her richest provinces, France has accumulated hundreds of millions of dollars in the securities of other countries, and has only recently been able to subscribe twenty-five times over the Russian loan, and is negotiating a loan to China, the money for which is to be supplied by her working people.
Be it noted also that the debt of France is held by the people of France, largely by the industrial class, and especially by the agricultural class, and the interest thereon paid, instead of being a foreign drain, is a perpetual renewal of the current circulation.
One more brief contrast between France and England. No reader of current literature need be told of the appalling prevalence of poverty in Great Britain. As France is a country without poor-houses, so it may be said that England is a land of poor rates and poor unions. The latest official announcement is that the agricultural interest is declining more rapidly than ever before; and in regions where only fifteen years ago the land rented readily at several pounds per acre, statesmen and economists are appalled at the sight of that which so alarmed our New England people a few years ago: the phenomenon of abandoned farms. We are told that there is a revival of industry because British capitalists have withdrawn their money from other countries and will put it in anything rather than have it entirely idle; but the condition of agriculture steadily grows worse.
And have we anything to boast of in our own happy land in comparison with France? Our natural resources so far exceed those of any old country that a comparison would be ridiculous; and the monometallists tell us, when they are trying to prove that gold is not enhanced in value, that, by reason of inventions, a day’s labor will produce at least twice as much as in 1870, and in many lines a great deal more than twice as much. Why, then, does not the laborer receive twice as much as he did in 1870? As wages are labor’s dividend of its own product, and as capital had its dividend then as now, if a day’s labor does not bring the laborer twice what it did, he is wronged; and, considering our resources, if we are not five times as well off as the French people, the only reason can be that we have slighted our opportunities, and blundered most fearfully in our management.
The monometallists profess to be great sticklers for experience and demonstrated fact; to have a horror of “theory.” We present them the example of France as an unanswerable proof that one great nation can maintain bimetallism, and that by maintaining it she escaped the worst evils that have affected the monometallic countries, and assured for herself an extraordinary progress and prosperity. We present them, in contrast, the example of England, and point them especially to the great difference in the progress of the common people of the two countries. We ask them, with this experience, to consider the present condition of this country, and the evils that have affected it since 1873, and seriously to consider the question as to whether something is not radically wrong; whether some malign influence has not gone between us and the reward of our work, and robbed us of that to which we are honestly entitled.
Bimetallism Abroad.
Many monometallists start with the assumption that what they call the “silver craze” is a mere fad, temporary and local; that the advocates of bimetallism are confined chiefly to the United States, and to the western part of it, and that, if they are thoroughly defeated at the November election, the discussion will be at an end.
“Mistaken souls that dream of heaven.”
They do not realize that, although it has not taken the same popular form, the discussion is quite as serious in monometallic Germany and England, and in the latter country opinion has so far advanced that both parties agree on the enormous enhancement in the value of gold. There is now scarcely a difference of opinion in England on this point, but there is as to the effect. British monometallists assert that as England is a great creditor nation, the world owing her, as estimated, $12,000,000,000, every advance in the purchasing power of money is greatly to her advantage. In Mr. Gladstone’s last public speech on the subject he stated that fact with great frankness, claiming that it was to England’s interest that money should remain as now in purchasing power, and that if she should abandon the gold basis, because gold is worth far more than it was a few years ago, the world might applaud her generosity, but it would sneer at her wisdom.