I. BY WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN.
We hear much about a “stable currency” and an “honest dollar.” It is a significant fact that those who advocate a single gold standard have for the most part avoided a discussion of the effect of an appreciating standard. They take it for granted that a gold standard is not only an honest standard, but the only stable standard. I denounce that child of ignorance and avarice, the gold dollar under a universal gold standard, as the most dishonest dollar which we could employ.
I stand upon the authority of every intelligent writer upon political economy when I assert that there is not and never has been an honest dollar. An honest dollar is a dollar absolutely stable in relation to all other things. Laughlin, in his work on “Bimetallism,” says:
Monometallists do not—as it is often said—believe that gold remains absolutely stable in value. They hold that there is no such thing as a “standard of value” for future payments in either gold or silver which remains absolutely invariable.
He even suggests a multiple standard for long-time contracts. I quote his words:
As regards national debts, it is distinctly averred that neither gold nor silver forms a just measure of deferred payments, and that if justice in long contracts is sought for, we should not seek it by the doubtful and untried expedient of international bimetallism, but by the clear and certain method of a multiple standard, a unit based upon the selling prices of a number of articles of general consumption. A long time contract would thereby be paid at its maturity by the same purchasing power as was given in the beginning.
Jevons, one of the most generally accepted of the writers in favor of a gold standard, admits the instability of a single standard, and in language very similar to that above quoted suggests the multiple standard as the most equitable, if practicable. Chevalier, who wrote a book in 1858 to show the injustice of allowing a debtor to pay his debts in a cheap gold dollar, recognized the same fact, and said:
If the value of the metal declined, the creditor would suffer a loss upon the quantity he had received; if, on the contrary, it rose, the debtor would have to pay more than he calculated upon.
I am on sound and scientific ground, therefore, when I say that a dollar approaches honesty as its purchasing power approaches stability. If I borrow a thousand dollars to-day and next year pay the debt with a thousand dollars which will secure exactly as much of all things desirable as the one thousand which I borrowed, I have paid in honest dollars. If the money has increased or decreased in purchasing power, I have satisfied my debt with dishonest dollars. While the government can say that a given weight of gold or silver shall constitute a dollar, and invest that dollar with legal-tender qualities, it cannot fix the purchasing power of the dollar. That must depend upon the law of supply and demand, and it may be well to suggest that this government never tried to fix the exchangeable value of a dollar until it began to limit the number of dollars coined.