mean if suddenly introduced to-day? It would mean that any one, American or foreigner, could at pleasure expand our silver currency and thereby increase our public obligation by taking to our mints silver bullion worth about 50 cents and getting back a silver dollar worth about twice as much in its debt-paying power.
This would, no doubt, be a profitable arrangement for those who have silver to take to the mint. Who are they? To judge from the talk of silver orators you might think that, if only free coinage were once established, every farmer would have his private silver mine in his back yard and every laborer a magic source of silver supply in his kitchen. Such delusions would soon vanish. It would turn out that the men who would have large quantities of silver bullion to be doubled in value are the rich mine owners, the silver kings, who belong to the heaviest capitalists in the country, and the bullion dealers, the great brokers, the big money-changers, here as well as in England and on the European continent—in short, what Populists usually call the “money power.” How large the rush of silver to our mints and the consequent addition to our silver coinage would be, I will not here conjecture. It is, indeed, certain that the inducement of any great profit would very soon disappear. But in any event there will be an indeterminable, indefinite expansion of our silver circulation in prospect, and I maintain that this indefinite prospect of expansion would utterly destroy the parity of the two metals.
It is true some of the free-coinage men reason “that free coinage would increase the demand so as to restore the old price.” Let us see. The act of 1873, as has been shown, did not curtail existing demand, for there had been no such demand in this country for many years. The demonetization of silver in the old world did curtail the demand, but it was far from being the only cause of the
