In Chicago, many years ago, there was an old colored man at the Grand Pacific. I met him one morning, and he looked very sad, and I said to him, "Uncle, what is the matter?" "Well," he said, "my wife ran away last night. Pretty good looking woman; a good deal younger than I am; but she has run off." And he says: "Colonel, I want to give you my idea about marriage. If a man wants to marry a woman and have a good time, and be satisfied and secure in his mind, he wants to marry some woman that no other man on God's earth would have."
That is the kind of money these gentlemen want in the United States. Cheap money. Do you know that the words cheap money are a contradiction in terms? Cheap money is always discounted when people find out that it is cheap. We want good money, and I do not care how much we get. But we want good money. Men are willing to toil for good money; willing to work in the mines; willing to work in the heat and glare of the furnace; willing to go to the top of the mast on the wild sea; willing to work in tenements; women are willing to sew with their eyes filled with tears for the sake of good money. And if anything is to be paid in good money, labor is that thing. If any man is entitled to pure gold, it is the man who labors. Let the big fellows take cheap money. Let the men living next the soil be paid in gold. But I want the money of this country as good as that of any other country.
When our money is below par we feel below par. I want our money, no matter how it is payable, to have the gold behind it. That is the money I want in the United States.
I want to teach the people of the world that a Democracy is honest. I want to teach the people of the world that America is not only capable of self-government, but that it has the self-denial, the courage, the honor, to pay its debts to the last farthing.
Mr. Bryan tells the farmers who are in debt that they want cheap money. What for? To pay their debts. And he thinks that is a compliment to the tillers of the soil. The statement is an insult to the farmers, and the farmers of Maine and Vermont have answered him.
And if the farmers of those States with their soil can be honest, I think a farmer in Illinois has no excuse for being a rascal. I regard the farmers as honest men, and when the sun shines and the rains fall and the frosts wait, they will pay their debts. They are good men, and I want to tell you to-night that all the stories that have been told about farmers being Populists are not true.
You will find the Populists in the towns, in the great cities, in the villages. All the failures, no matter for what reason, are on the Populist's side. They want to get rich by law. They are tired of work.
And yet Mr. Bryan says vote for cheap money so that you can pay your debts in fifty cent dollars. Will an honest man do it?
Suppose a man has borrowed a thousand bushels of wheat of his neighbor, of sixty pounds to the bushel, and then Congress should pass a law making thirty pounds of wheat a bushel. Would that farmer pay his debt with five hundred bushels and consider himself an honest man?
Mr. Bryan says, "Vote for cheap money to pay your debts," and thereupon the creditor says, "What is to become of me?" Mr. Bryan says, "We will make it one dollar and twenty-nine cents an ounce, and make it of the ratio of sixteen to one, make it as good as gold." And thereupon the poor debtor says, "How is that going to help me?" And in nearly all the speeches that this man has made he has taken the two positions, first, that we want cheap money to pay debts, and second, that the money would be just as good as gold for creditors.