BY HON. CHARLES A. TOWNE,
Chairman Provisional National Committee Silver Republican Party.
On Saturday evening, April 24, 1897, at the Waldorf Hotel, New York, there was held a political banquet intended as a most impressive function, but which has passed into history as a very ridiculous one. Big with self-complacence and puffed with pride, as it appeared in the brilliant lights and gorgeous appointments of the palatial supper-hall, within twenty-four hours the lacerating indignation of Mr. Watterson and the trenchant raillery of Mr. Bryan had let the tumid pretentiousness all out of it, and it had collapsed into a flaccid and “innocuous desuetude.” The “star-eyed goddess” turned her back upon it, the “wild-orbed anarch” snapped his fingers at it, and even everyday Mrs. Grundy laughed it to scorn. Projected with the most alluring and satisfying expectations, the feast has dwindled to the memory of a sad mistake in the mind of every man that assisted at it. Planned as a sort of coronation ceremony, its completed performance unaccountably wore the complexion of belated obsequies irreverently disturbed by the guffaws of the multitude.
But the aspect of this banquet as a piece of ill-conceived political strategy that never was formidable, or as a rite in the ceremonial of a hero-worship that is as inexplicable as inopportune, does not now so much concern me as does its office as a dispenser of misinformation and unsound philosophy, which are always dangerous. Many who condemn the folly of it as a move in practical politics nevertheless loudly commend the economic doctrines it contributed to spread. But inasmuch as, in my opinion, the science it taught is as bad as the politics it practised, I propose to call attention to a few of the arrogant assumptions and mischievous theories that found emphatic and repeated expression at this feast.
Did the purpose of this article permit, it would be interesting to make Mr. Cleveland’s speech the text of some examination into the ex-President’s peculiarities of style. It was Clevelandesque to the core. All his protuberant characteristics are there: the leviathanic egotism, the profound and tenebrous ponderosity, the labored intricacy of the commonplace, the pedagogic moralizing, the oracular inconsequence. How absurdly obvious it all is now, and how inexplicable that the glamour of high place should ever have clothed such matter as his with the seeming of philosophy and statesmanship! ‘Tis the very frippery and trumpery of the stage after the lights are out and the audience has departed.
In his opening Mr. Cleveland says: “On every side we are confronted with popular depression and complaint.” This language stirs an echo of the long ago. In his special message to the extra session of the Fifty-third Congress in August, 1893, he thus announced a similar condition: “Suddenly financial distrust and fear have sprung up on every side.” But he accounts differently for these two identical phenomena. The situation to-day he largely attributes to “the work of agitators and demagogues.” In 1893 he declared: “I believe these things are principally chargeable to Congressional legislation touching the purchase and coinage of silver by the general government.”
The ex-President’s explanations are both wrong, and nobody ought to know it so well as himself. His relations with the great gold bankers were exceedingly intimate in 1892 and 1893, and have been so ever since. It is notorious that the panic of 1893 was a bankers’ panic deliberately brought about by these men to frighten public sentiment into supplementing their demand for the repeal of the purchasing clause of the Sherman law of 1890. The agitation against that law was a whooped-up and manufactured agitation. No legitimate interest had suffered from its operation. On the contrary, the access of standard silver dollars coined under the laws of 1878 and 1890 had been of incalculable advantage to the country. In his annual message of December 2, 1890, President Harrison had thus referred to this fact: “The general tendency of the markets was upward from influences wholly apart from the recent tariff legislation. The enlargement of our currency by the silver bill undoubtedly gave an upward tendency to trade and had a marked effect on prices.” And again: “It is gratifying to know that the increased circulation secured by the act has exerted, and will continue to exert a most beneficial influence upon business and upon general values.”
Such an influence that circulation did indeed continue to exert. The comparative prosperity of the two following years, which, in contrast with the conditions of the subsequent period, causes 1892 to wear to wistful eyes so beautiful a hue in these unhappy days, would have been an absolute impossibility but for the silver legislation.
Nor was the credit of the government menaced. It was a malicious afterthought that represented the silver dollar as a charge upon the credit of the nation. That dollar was a standard dollar. It was never “redeemed” in anything but the money-work it did. There was no law for its redemption, and there was as yet no attempt, such as Mr. Carlisle in 1896 declared himself ready to make, to commit the crime of an administrative degradation of the circulating silver dollars into promises for the payment of gold. The Treasury Notes, issued in payment for silver bullion under the law of 1890, were redeemable in either gold or silver at the discretion of the Secretary of the Treasury; and inasmuch as there was silver behind every one of them, they could become a menace to the credit of the government only in case of the betrayal of his duty by that official.
But the contractionists looked with alarm upon the improving conditions of the country. Something must be done to discredit silver, or by and by there might arise such a demand for the full restoration of its mint privileges and money powers as could not be balked, as every similar demand had been balked since 1873; and in that event the slow villany of many years would have been fruitless and the contractionists’ occupation would be gone. Then was formed the deep design to compel the repeal of the purchasing clause of the Sherman law. The gigantic forces that had been behind Mr. Cleveland in the memorable campaign of 1892 had not lost their cunning or their power. They knew their implements, and they had had much experience. Their strategy was customary and it was effective. To-day Mr. Cleveland complains because the Republican party, having won the contest of last November on the money question, should have hurried into the current extra session on the tariff question. Let him recall his own course when, having carried the country in 1892 on the tariff question, he summoned the extra session of 1893 to consider the money question. Such a reflection might possibly assist him in fathoming the present motives of the men who won in 1892 to achieve the gold standard and in 1896 to preserve it.