For the election of Mr. Cleveland was a carefully executed move in an elaborate and merciless programme. The president of a national bank in North Dakota, a man of character and thorough reliability, has recently made public a conversation between himself and a prominent New York bank president, held not long after that election, in which the latter, whose institution was a member of the Associated National Banks, declared in substance as follows: “We have just elected Grover Cleveland President of the United States upon the express understanding with us that the policy of the administration shall be to uphold and advance the gold standard”; and he foretold, with startlingly faithful prevision, the repeal of the Sherman purchase law, the successive bond-issues, and the general and ruinous fall of prices, which seem to have evidenced the strict performance of the agreement by the party of the second part.
How persistently the power of the executive was used, and how carefully the offices were dispensed, to influence Senators and members of Congress against the Sherman law, were matters of ordinary comment at the time. Meanwhile the banks were putting in motion their peculiar and enormous persuasions. For months no man could go into any bank in any State of the Union for any purpose without having thrust under his nose, with a more or less pointed request for his signature, a petition demanding the repeal of the obnoxious statute. Then, in the latter days of April, 1893, on the stock exchange, there began that concerted onslaught upon stocks and values, vaunted as an “object-lesson” to the people, as a result of which within eight months six hundred of the relatively smaller banking institutions of the country went down, dragging with them fifteen thousand industrial and business enterprises, involving a total loss of seven hundred and fifty millions of dollars.
The object-lesson served its purpose. With the business world shattered into fragments, enterprise stifled, and credit dead, a terror seized upon the people. The opportunity for which the big bankers had been coolly waiting had come. Cunningly and in many places at once they started the cry that the Sherman law had caused all this havoc, and that the only hope for a return of prosperity lay in the immediate repeal of the feature providing for the purchase of new silver bullion. The clamor was eagerly repeated, and fear eagerly believed it. At precisely the right moment the President himself made official proclamation that the rumor was true, and summoned Congress in extra session to obey the mandate of the bankers. Under this spell Congress acted and the law was repealed. Thus was the country made dependent upon gold alone for its new supplies of full-power money, and thus, aided by similar action elsewhere, was inaugurated an era of accelerated fall of prices more pronounced than the world has known since the middle ages, and a precipitate decline of values more ruinous than any other chronicled in history.
“Agitators and demagogues” indeed! Is it not monstrous that any intelligent man should believe the present frightful condition of the country to be due to the work of agitators and demagogues? Mr. Cleveland of course knows better; but many people have actually been convinced that some millions of our citizens would rather agitate than work; that thousands of them have deliberately and by preference forsworn business and become demagogues by trade. The thoughtful man knows that agitation is first a result and afterward a cause. It is a cruel as well as an ignorant thing for Mr. Cleveland and his disciples to cast into the faces of the suffering producers and workers of the United States, as a reproach, the fact of their discontent and complaining. Of course our people are in distress. Of course they are crying out against it. Of course they will endeavor to learn what occasions it. And of course when they have ascertained what the matter is they will agitate for relief. Substantially all men prefer to be busy about the ordinary and interdependent offices of social life. This is especially true of the great middle classes in the United States. Under just and rational laws they will be so. The absence of such a temper is ground for suspicion against the laws. Existing conditions confess their weakness and injustice when they revile admitted discontent. I would rather the cause I believe in sprang from suffering than that suffering should follow my cause.
The full magnitude of this achievement for the gold standard in the repeal of the law of 1890, will not be grasped unless we bear in mind that it occurred at a time when the indications were unusually favorable that an international bimetallic agreement, which the world had been trying to accomplish for nearly twenty years, might soon be secured on an acceptable basis. It has long been suspected that the strongest discouragement of this hope, and probably the determining factor in its failure, was the attitude of President Cleveland as quietly caused to be understood abroad. Very recently this well-grounded suspicion has been turned into certainty by the distinguished English bimetallist, Mr. Moreton Frewen, who, in a letter to the Washington Post, says:
But Mr. Cleveland made it known, through the subterranean channels of diplomacy, that, far from giving any support to silver, he was preparing to urge on Congress the repeal of the silver-purchase clauses of the Sherman act. Mr. Cleveland’s intention became known in official circles in Calcutta. That this was the case I learned at the time and at first hand. The government of India believed that the cessation of all silver purchases in America would still further reduce the exchange value of the rupee, and therefore, in advance of the pending anti-silver legislation anticipated from Washington, the Indian mints were closed.
Mr. Cleveland may well be deified in the gold-standard cult, for clearly he has been the arch-enemy of bimetallism.
One of the characteristics of the discussion now going on between the advocates of gold monometallism and those of bimetallism is the disingenuousness of the former. They will rarely consent to a clear definition of the issue, but seek to evade it both by preëmpting the use of moral labels and catchphrases which satisfy their partisans without inquiry, and by stigmatizing their opponents with such vile imputations and base epithets as seem to place them beyond the pale of moral and intellectual tolerance. “Sound” and “honest” they write above their creed. They pose as consecrated guardians of public honor and private property. We are depicted as dishonest and imbecile, repudiators of national and individual obligations, communists or anarchists bearing the torch and axe. This specialty is Mr. Cleveland’s long suit. Little wonder that his school should place him at its head. His preëminence in the field where self-admiration is a supreme virtue and ribald abuse passes for irrefutable argument will scarcely be denied by anybody who shall have read the following characteristic specimens from this Waldorf essay, carefully written down and calmly delivered: “We are gathered here to-night as patriotic citizens anxious to do something toward … protecting the fair fame of our nation against shame and scandal.” It is not recorded that anybody smiled at this. Indeed, the astonishing thing about this business is that these people seem able to impose successfully on one another. But Mr. Cleveland is even better at the other kind, as for example: “Agitators and demagogues,” “ruthless agitators,” “sordid greed,” “inflamed with tales of an ancient crime against their rights,” “unfortunate and unreasonable,” “restless and turbulent,” “reckless creed,” “boisterous and passionate campaign,” “allied forces of calamity,” “encouraged by malign conditions,” and so on ad nauseam.
This is the attitude of nearly all the defenders of the gold standard who have the hardihood to say anything at all. Undoubtedly in many cases it is assumed because of ignorance on the merits of the case, so that nothing remains but to “abuse the other fellow.” But occasionally this course is adopted by men who are well informed, and who know that the gold standard is incapable of meeting bimetallism in an honest contest of argument with any hope of success. The strategy of these, therefore, is to avoid fair discussion by so prejudicing the public mind against their opponents as to forestall a hearing.
The result has been surprisingly successful. In many localities, and in fact in nearly all localities in the East, the most intolerant spirit has been manifested by the most prominent persons in the community, who had never taken the pains to examine the subject on which they so violently and fanatically expressed themselves. To people of any acquaintance with the literature, the history, and the science of money, it has seemed most marvellous that business men of large affairs, of much general information, and of excellent natural abilities, should be content to remain absolutely ignorant of fundamental monetary principles and the overwhelmingly attested lessons of past experience. It is infinitely pitiful to see men of affairs led away in so-called “business men’s sound-money associations” and other similar movements, when a knowledge of the conditions on which their welfare depends would send them in an exactly opposite direction.