If Not Silver, What?Bookwalter, John W. (John Wesley)
History
If Not Silver, What?
Bookwalter, John W. (John Wesley)
Silver question
There is another way to calculate the decline, and that is by taking the
average farm value instead of the export or New York city price, and
including all roots and garden products not exported, and this makes the
showing far more favorable to silver. The Agricultural Department at
Washington has recently issued a pamphlet showing the crops of every year
since 1870, and the average home or farm price, together with the total
for which the whole crop was sold. Send for it and contrast the prices
given in it with those known to you to-day, and you will find that in rye,
barley, oats, potatoes, and many other things the decline has been very
much greater than is given above. In short, it takes more farm produce to
buy an ounce of silver than it did in 1873, and twice as much to buy an
ounce of gold. Of Ohio medium scoured wool, for instance--and that is the
standard wool of the market--it would have taken in 1873 two and a half
pounds to have bought an ounce of silver, while to-day it will take
considerably over three pounds. The monometallists habitually talk, and
have talked it so long that they believe it themselves, as if silver had
become so cheap that the farmer ought to rank it with tin, lead, or
spelter; but if the farmer will try the experiment he will find that it
takes a good deal more of his product to buy a given amount of silver than
it did in 1873.
The plain truth of the matter is that the time has come for both gold and
silver to increase in purchasing power; but by reason of demonetization
almost the entire increase has been concentrated in gold, leaving silver
almost stationary as to commodities in general, but somewhat enhanced as
to farm products. In the name of common, honesty, is it not a high-handed
outrage to make the old debts of that period payable in the rapidly
appreciating metal, instead of one that has merely retained its value? and
is it not hypocrisy to speak of such a system as "honest money," and
affect to deplore the dishonesty of those who insist upon their right to
pay in the least variable metal, which was constitutional and the unit of
our money from the very start?
=We certainly do want to pay our debts in honest money.=
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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