Was it Passed Surreptitiously?
How can a law be passed through Congress surreptitiously? We have indeed heard of bills being “smuggled through” in the confusion attending the last hours of the session, or as an amendment, or under a misleading title. There are the rules of order, however, by which all legislation is enacted. All laws which get through the mill are equally valid. There never has been and never can be any distinction drawn between them according to their legislative history. In the present case there was not the slightest manœuvre or trick, nor is there even room to trump up an allegation of the kind.
That the People Did Not Know of It.
It is said that “the people” did not know what was being done. How do they ever know what is being done? There is all the machinery of publicity, and it is all at work. If people do not heed (and of course in nearly all cases they do not), whose fault is it? Who is responsible to go to the ten million voters individually and make sure that they heed, lest twenty-five years later somebody may say that the fact that they did not heed lays down a justification for a new project which certainly is “a crime” in the new sense which is given to that word here?
Motive of the Law.
The act of 1873 did not affect any rights or interests. It took away an option which had existed since 1834, but had never been used, and, for ten years before this act was passed, had sunk entirely out of sight under paper-money inflation. Secretary Boutwell, when he first brought the matter to the attention of Congress in 1870, explained the proposed legislation as a codification of existing coinage laws. Later it took the shape of a complete simplification of existing law, history, and fact, in order to put the coinage on the simplest and best system as a basis for resumption. As we had then no coin, we had a free hand to put the system on the best basis, there being no vested rights or interests to be disturbed. That this was a wise and sound course to pursue under the circumstances is unquestionable. Three years later, by the rise in greenbacks and the fall in silver, it came about that four hundred twelve and one-half grains of silver, nine-tenths fine, was worth a little less than a greenback dollar. The old option would, therefore, if still existent, have been an advantage to debtors. Complaint and clamor for the restoration of the option then began, but to give such an option, after the market had changed, would be playing with loaded dice. The European countries which still retained the option abolished it as soon as silver began to fall, and we, if we had retained it open until that time, ought to have done the same.
Alternate Ruin to Debtors and Creditors.
The inflation of the Civil War had a direful effect upon all creditors on contracts outstanding in 1862. The resumption of specie payments had a similar effect on debtors under contracts made between 1868 and 1878. Greenbackism and silver debasement were produced by resistance to this operation. The debtors of to-day are not those of that period. The debts of that period are paid off. The pain and strain have been borne. The credit of the United States has been established, the currency restored, and the whole business of the country for seventeen years has been completely established on the gold dollar as the dollar of account for all transactions whatsoever. The population of the country is now two and a half times what it was in the war time, and its wealth is probably a much greater multiple. The debts now outstanding have, with unimportant exceptions, been contracted since the resumption of specie payments. What is now proposed is to enter upon a new period of these alternations of wrong and injustice, first to creditors, then to debtors, and so on, and to do this in a time of peace, not from any political necessity, but on the ground of some economic interpretations of the facts of the market, which are incapable of verification and proof, when they are not obviously erroneous and partisan. The effect of the various compromises with silver is that the currency is once more intricate and complicated, excessive and confused, so that few can understand it, and it offers all sorts of chances for perverse and mischievous interpretations.
Demonetization Removed No Money from Use.
The law of 1873 never threw a dollar of silver or other currency out of circulation. We hear it asserted that “demonetization” destroyed half the people’s money. People say this who know nothing of the facts, but infer that demonetization must mean that some silver dollars which were money had that character taken from them. No one of the other demonetizations, which took place in Europe at about the same time, diminished the money in use. The result of changes in 1873–1874 was that the amount of silver coin in use in Europe was greatly increased, and has remained so since.