Out of the conflict over the inflation and contraction of the currency grew the struggle over "free silver" which was not ended until the campaign of 1900. To understand this controversy we must go back beyond the Civil War. The Constitution, as drafted in 1787, gives Congress the power to coin money and regulate the value thereof and forbids the states to issue bills of credit or make anything but the gold and silver coin of the United States legal tender in the payment of debts. Nothing is said in that instrument about the power of Congress to issue paper money, and it is questionable whether the framers intended to leave the door open for legal tenders or notes of any kind. In 1792, the new Federal government began to coin gold and silver at the ratio of 1 to 15, but it was soon found that at this ratio gold was undervalued, and consequently little or no gold was brought to the Treasury to be coined. At length, in 1834, Congress, by law, fixed the ratio between the two metals approximately at 16 to 1; but this was found to be an overvaluation of gold or an undervaluation of silver, as some said, and as a result silver was not brought to the Treasury for coinage and almost dropped out of the monetary system. Finally, in 1873, when the silver dollar was already practically out of circulation, Congress discontinued the coinage of the standard silver dollar altogether--"demonetized" it--and left gold as the basis of the monetary system.[29] It happened about this time that the price of silver began to decline steadily, until within twenty years it was about half the price it was in 1870. Some men attributed this fall in the price of silver to the fact that Germany had demonetized it in 1871, and that about the same time rich deposits of silver were discovered in the United States. Others declared that silver had not fallen so much in price, but that gold, in which it was measured, had risen on account of the fact that silver had been demonetized and gold given a monopoly of the coinage market. On this matter Republicans and Democrats were both divided, for it brought a new set of economic antagonisms into play--the debtor and the creditor--as opposed to the antagonisms growing out of slavery and reconstruction.