The farmers expect to double the price of their products, and so get silver to pay off their mortgages. It has been shown elsewhere[39] how illusory this expectation is as regards prices. Prices would rise, indeed, in silver, but irregularly and unequally. They would rise for all things which a farmer buys as well as for all that he sells. If, as the silver theorists generally say, all prices were to rise uniformly, the farmer would gain but little. For the only means he would win toward paying off his mortgage would be the surplus of his income over his outgo, and this he could only apply year by year as he won it. If, then, the whole scheme could be made to work smoothly provided the victims of it would submit to it without resistance, does this afford any probability of realizing the great hopes which are built upon the scheme?
Social War the Consequence.
But victims would not submit without resistance, and once more we come to the result that no effect can be expected from this undertaking but social war, and a convulsion of the entire social system, whose consequences defy analysis or prediction. If a man says that he “does not see” what great difference going over to the silver standard will make, it must be that he is little trained to understand the workings of the industrial system in which he lives and on which he depends. It is a monstrous thing that a free, self-governing people should join a political battle, in this year of grace 1896, over the question whether to debase their coinage or not.
The Exploded Booms.
The third class of debtors is by far the most important in this matter—those who are caught in exploded booms. The peaceful and honest mortgagors of farms and homesteads are not the ones who have gotten up this political agitation. The jobbers, speculators, and boom-promoters have been one of the curses of this country from the earliest colonial days. They are men of the “hustling” type, jobbing in politics with one hand and in land or town lots with the other. It is they who, at the worst periods of financial trouble in our history, have always appeared in the lobby, eager for “relief,” declaiming about the “people,” the “money power,” the “banks,” “England,” etc. They have always favored schemes for fraudulent banks, or paper money, or state subsidies, or other plans by which they could unload on the state or on their creditors. Just now it is silver, because silver has fallen within twenty-five years so much that it is what is called “cheap money.” This type of men have always used a dialect, part of which is quoted above, which is so well marked that it suffices to identify them. The history of financial distress in this country is full of it. No scheme which has ever been devised by them has ever made a collapsed boom go up again. With very few exceptions, they have, on account of such expedients, only floundered deeper in the mire. The exceptions have been those who have succeeded in making the state provide them with capital, although by no means all of these have been hard-headed enough to use it to “get out.” Generally they believe in themselves and their schemes, and use new capital only to plunge in again still deeper.
It is men of this class and the silver-miners who have brought the present trouble upon us, who have invented and preached the notions about the crime of ’73, the hard times, the magical influence of silver, and all the rest. It is they who have filled and engineered conventions. They will gain no more now than in any former crisis, but they insist on involving us all in turmoil, risk, and ruin by their schemes to save themselves.
THE CRIME OF 1873[40]
Legislative History of the Act of 1873.
It is alleged that the law of 1873 was enacted surreptitiously. Mr. Bryan is quoted as having said that the free-coinage men only ask for a restoration of “that system that we had until it was stricken down in the dark without discussion.” Within the last ten years the facts of the legislative history of that law have been published over and over again. They are to be found in the report of the Comptroller of the Currency for 1876, page 170; in “Macpherson’s Political Manual” for 1890, page 157, and in “Sound Currency,” Vol. III, No. 13. The bill was before Congress three years, was explained and debated again and again. The fact that the silver dollar was dropped was expressly pointed out. It is not now justifiable for any man who claims to be honest and responsible to assert that it was passed “in the dark and without discussion.” The fact is that nobody cared about it. It is noteworthy that the act is not in “Macpherson’s Manual” for 1874. It was not thought to be of any importance. It was not until after the panic of 1873 that attention began to be given to the currency. To that, I who write can testify, since I tried in vain, before that time, to excite any interest in the subject. I was once in the gallery of the House of Representatives when a question of coinage was before the House. I counted those members who, as far as I could judge, were paying any attention. There were six. What is it necessary to do in such a case in order to prevent the claim, twenty-five years later, when countless interests have vested under the law, that the law is open to “reversal” because it was passed “in the dark”?