If Not Silver, What?Bookwalter, John W. (John Wesley)
History
If Not Silver, What?
Bookwalter, John W. (John Wesley)
Silver question
That objection is obsolete. We do not now carry coin; we carry its paper
representatives, those issued by government being absolutely secured. This
combines all the advantage of coin, bank paper, and the proposed fiat
money. A silver certificate for $500 weighs less than a gold dollar. In
that denomination the Jay Gould estate could be carried by one man.
=But silver certificates would not remain at par.=
At par with what? Everything in the universe is at par with itself. The
volume of certificates issued by the government would be exactly the
amount of the metal deposited, and that amount could never be suddenly
increased or diminished, for the product of the mines in any one year is
very seldom more than three per cent. of the stock already on hand, and
half of that is used in the arts. It is self-evident, therefore, that such
certificates would be many times more stable in value than any form of
bank paper yet devised.
=Gold would go out of circulation.=
It has already gone out. Under the present policy of the government we
have all the disadvantages of both systems and the advantages of neither,
with the added element of chronic uncertainty and an artificial scare
gotten up for political purposes.
=And that very scare shows an important fact which you silverites ought
to heed--that nearly all the bankers and heavy moneyed men are opposed to
free coinage.=
Nearly all the slaveholders were opposed to emancipation. All the
landlords in Great Britain were opposed to the abolition of the Corn Laws,
and all the silversmiths of Ephesus were violently opposed to the
"agitation" started by St. Paul. And what of it? The silversmiths were
honest enough to admit the cause of their opposition (Acts xix. 24, 28),
but these fellows are not. The Ephesians got up a riot; these fellows get
up panics. "Have ye not read that when the devil goeth out of a man then
it teareth him?"
=But are not bankers and other men who handle money as a business better
qualified than other people to judge of the proper metal?=
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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