Money: Speech of Hon. John P. Jones, of Nevada, on the Free Coinage of Silver; in the United States Senate, May 12 and 13, 1890Jones, John P. (John Percival)
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Money: Speech of Hon. John P. Jones, of Nevada, on the Free Coinage of Silver; in the United States Senate, May 12 and 13, 1890
Jones, John P. (John Percival)
Silver question -- Speeches in Congress
If the professors of political economy, the Eastern newspaper editors,
and the professional financiers were then so seriously mistaken ought
they not to be a little modest now in making predictions, especially in
renewing predictions that have been already discredited? They can not
point to a single instance in which their prophesy has not been
falsified by the event. So humiliating a failure on the part of the
professors, in a realm of which they boastfully claimed to be masters,
so complete an overthrow of these "experts" by men who were ridiculed
and derided as rural financiers and crazy theorists, ought to put the
advocates of the gold standard on their guard against a like defeat on
this occasion. They are pressed for reasons to account for the utter
miscarriage of their prophecies. They are left without a shadow of
consolation except that the coinage of $2,000,000 worth of silver
bullion each month has not succeeded in placing silver at a par with
gold. They affect to believe that the advocates of silver in 1878
expected that that metal, under the very limited demand of $2,000,000 a
month, would be brought to a level with gold, which, owing to the
demonetization of silver, had risen abnormally and ruinously in value.
No such belief was ever entertained or expressed. On the contrary it was
repeatedly asserted by the advocates of silver that so long as the
entire yield of gold from all the mines of the world (in 1878,
$119,000,000) was invested with the full money function and had free
access to all mints to be transmuted into coin, it could not be expected
that the conferring of the legal-tender function upon a sum so
comparatively trifling as one-fourth the yield of silver (the yield in
1878 being $99,000,000) would have the effect of placing it on a level
with gold.
It is, however, a significant fact that every silver dollar that has
been coined under that act is at a parity with gold, and will to-day buy
as much of all the objects of human desire as will the gold dollar. Nay,
more, silver bullion--disparaged and discredited as it is by being shorn
of the money function, and denied access to the mints, instead of
decreasing in purchasing power, has maintained so steady a relation to
commodities that 412-1/2 grains of uncoined silver will exchange for as
much to-day as would the coined dollar, whether of silver or gold, in
1873, when the full money function attached equally to both metals. If
this be true--and I shall presently demonstrate it beyond
refutation--what an utter perversion of terms it is to say that silver
has fallen in value!
WILL REMONETIZATION PLACE US ALONGSIDE INDIA.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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