It is worth exactly twenty dollars. Is it a legal tender? No. Has its value been changed? No. Take a silver dollar. It is a legal tender; now pound it into a cube, and how much is it worth? A little less than fifty cents. What gives it the value of a dollar? The fact that it is a legal tender? No; but the promise of the Government to keep it on an equality with gold. I will not only say this, but I will demonstrate it. I do not ask you to take my word; just use the sense you have.
The Mexican silver dollar has a little more silver in it than one of our dollars, and the Mexican silver dollar is a legal tender in Mexico. If there is any magic about legal tender it ought to work as well in Mexico as in the United States. I take an American silver dollar and I go to Mexico. I buy a dinner for a dollar and I give to the Mexican the American dollar and he gives me a Mexican dollar in change. Yet both of the dollars are legal tender. Why is it that the Mexican dollar is worth only fifty cents? Because the Mexican Government has not agreed to keep it equal with gold; that is all, that is all.
We want the money of the civilized world, and I will tell you now that in the procession of nations every silver nation lags behind—every one. There is not a silver nation on the globe where decent wages are paid for human labor—not one. The American laborer gets ten times as much here in gold as a laborer gets in China in silver, twenty times as much as a laborer does in India, four times as much as a laborer gets in Russia; and yet we are told that the man who will "follow England" with the gold standard lacks patriotism and manhood. What then shall we say of the man that follows China, that follows India in the silver standard?
Does that require patriotism?
It certainly requires self-denial.
And yet these gentlemen say that our money is too good. They might as well say the air is too pure; they might as well say the soil is too rich. How can money be too good? Mr. Bryan says that it is so good, people hoard it; and let me tell him they always will. Mr. Bryan wants money so poor that everybody will be anxious to spend it. He wants money so poor that the rich will not have it. Then he thinks the poor can get it. We are willing to toil for good money. Good money means the comforts and luxuries of life. Real money is always good. Paper promises and silver substitutes may be poor; words and pictures may be cheap and may fade to worthlessness—but gold shines on.
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.