They make a strong appeal to the farmer. They say it will put up prices. Well, in a sense, yes. Nominally, yes. Really, no. If wheat goes from fifty cents to $1, the price has been increased, you will say; but if the price of everything else has gone up in the same proportion a bushel of wheat won't buy for the farmer any more sugar or coffee, or farming implements, or anything else that he has to purchase. If that dollar won't buy for the farmer any more than the one he has now, where is the good to anybody of introducing these fictitious prices? It would work very well for the farmer if the prices of wheat, hay, oats and rye would double and nothing else would double, but if everything doubles, who is the richer? Only the man who bought when we had an honest dollar and paid in a debased one; only the mine owner who uses this government to add fifty cents, more or less, to the value of every dollar's worth of metal that he produces from his mine.

My countrymen, this country of ours during the troublous times of the war had severe trials, but these financial questions are scarcely less troublous than those. During those times we had accumulated a debt so large that many of our pessimistic Democratic friends told us we could never pay it. We had a currency which we were compelled to make a legal tender that the constitution might live. But no sooner had the war ended than the great conscience

of this people declared that the nation that had crushed the great rebellion, that had lifted itself to a peerless position among the nations of the earth, should not continue to have a depreciated currency.

We resumed, and we made our greenback dollar a par dollar in gold. Shall we now in these times, when all the ills we suffer are curable if we will pass a revenue bill that will generously replenish the treasury of the United States, that will generously protect American labor against injurious competition and bring back again full prosperity to all our people-shall we now contemplate for a moment or allow to have any power over our hearts and minds this temptation to debase our currency and put our country financially alongside the Asiatic countries? Does not every instinct of national pride, does not every instinct of self-interest, does not our thoughtful interest in others, does not our sense of justice and honor rise up to rebuke the infamous proposition that this government and its people shall become a nation and a people that debases its currency to make debt-paying more easy?

COMPULSORY DISHONESTY

The Forum, October, 1896

Before smokeless powder was invented, an army was sometimes wrapped in the black gases belched from its own guns. Its soldiers were, in some respects, safer than when the air was clear, but the effectiveness of its guns was greatly lessened. The silver orators do not use smokeless powder, and, though the great political battle has only begun, the air is already thick. Let us go to a hilltop, or a tree top, and see if we can not trace the lines-at a few points.

The free-silver leaders do not seem to me to deny what their opponents assert-namely, that the free coinage of silver at the ratio of 16 to 1 will, if the relative commercial value of gold and silver remains unchanged, wipe out about one-half of every existing promise to pay money; that every promissory note, bond, savings deposit, bank deposit, building association certificate, life insurance policy, pension, salary and wage contract will be affected precisely as if the note, bond, certificate, deposit book, contract or pen

sion certificate had been surrendered for a new one in which was written one-half the amount of the old. "How much owest thou unto my lord?" And he said, "A hundred measures of oil." And he said unto him, "Take thy bill, and sit down quickly, and write fifty."

A Northwestern senator told me, when the silver debate was on in the senate in 1890-91, that a Southern senator had said to him, "I do not want you to think that I am a fool. I know that the free coinage of silver will scale the debts that my people owe and that's what we want. We are poor and in debt." The senator thus addressed replied, "Well I think you have saved your intellectual integrity, but at the cost of your moral integrity." When Senator Hill, of New York, in the Chicago convention, pressed this objection to free coinage, and Senator Vilas, of Wisconsin, declared that free coinage was robbery, Mr. Bryan, in a speech that won him the nomination for the presidency, had only this to say in reply:

"But if he means to say that we can not change our monetary system without protecting those who have loaned money before the change was made, I want to ask him where, in law or in morals, he can find authority for not protecting the debtors when the act of 1873 was passed, but now insists that we must protect the creditor?"

Senator Hill offered an amendment to the plat

form to carry out his thought-that when the United States degraded its coined dollars, their legal-tender quality should not extend to existing contracts. Some of the newspapers reported that the resolution was adopted unanimously; but that must have been a mistake, unless the convention in the confusion failed to understand the question. I have not seen an official copy of the platform, but it is understood that the presiding officer declares that Senator Hill's amendment was rejected. It would have taken the soul out of the free-silver campaign; and, so far from offering the relief that Mr. Bryan promises to the farmer-debtor, would require him to buy gold at an enormous premium to pay his debt, while he sold his products for silver.

The quotation I have made from Mr. Bryan's convention speech-and every other speech that I have seen-seems to me to affirm the legal and moral right of the United States to degrade its money standard, to pay its obligations in the debased coin, and to give to its citizens the right to discharge their debts in the same way. He meets the champion of the doctrine that the dollar of payment should be as good as the dollar borrowed, with a general denial and a counter-claim. The counter-claim is presented in behalf of the debtors of 1873-who, he intimates, were injured by the dropping of the silver dollar from our coinage in that year.

It is the supposed injury to the debtors of 1873