Where would the silver come from? The best authorities agree that there is not enough free silver in the world to even fill the place of our gold, which, you say, would be expelled. And right here is where the advocates of the gold standard contradict every well-established principle of political economy, and every lesson of experience, by declaring that the transfer of all our gold to Europe would not cheapen it there, and that free coinage would not increase the value of silver. They insist that we should still have "50-cent dollars." Stripped of all its fine garniture of rhetoric, their proposition simply amounts to this: The sudden addition of 20 per cent. to Europe's supply of gold would not cheapen it, and making a market here for all the free silver in the world would not raise its value; laying the burden of sustaining an enormous mass of credit currency on one metal instead of two has added nothing to the value of that metal; a thirty years' war on the other metal was not the cause of its depreciation in terms of gold, and if the conditions were reversed, greatly increasing the demand for silver and decreasing the demand for gold, they would remain in relative values just the same. If those propositions are true, all political economy is false. =Government cannot create values, in silver or anything else.= You have seen it done fifty times if you are as old as I. During the war, government once raised the price of horses $20 per head in a single day. On a certain day the land in the Platte Valley, for perhaps one hundred miles west of Omaha, was worth preemption price; the next day it was worth much more, and in a year three or four times as much. Government had authorized the construction of the Union Pacific Railroad, and before a single spade of earth was turned, millions of dollars in value had been added to the land. It had created a new use for the land. Value inheres in use when the thing used can be bought and sold. Whatever creates a use creates value, and a great increase in use forces an increase in value, provided that the supply does not increase equally fast; and with silver that is an impossibility. If you think government cannot add value to a metal, consider this conundrum: What would be the present value of gold if all nations should demonetize it? It can be calculated approximately. There is on hand enough gold to supply the arts for forty years at the present rate of consumption. What, then, is the present value of a commodity of which the world has forty years' supply on hand and all prepared for immediate use? Take notice, also, that in the decade 1850-60 Germany, Austria, and Belgium completely demonetized gold, and Holland and Portugal partially did so, thus depriving it of its legal tender quality among 70,000,000 people, and that this added very greatly to its then depression.