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Show SILVER EXPORTS. ' During the last few months more than 50,000,000 silver dollar? have been taken from the treasury vaults nod melted into bullion for export to India and other oiiental countries, w iie re large quantities of silver for I small coins are needed to pay soldiers j and for trade purposes. A fast as the I dollars were melted down silver certifi- I -ates based on the coin were withdrawn I from circulation. Their place has been ' :nkcn by $1 or $i! federal reserve notes. : the only strictly war-time currency' of j the United States. Recently the melt- ! ing of the silver dollars h;:s gone on j M. the rate of $1,000,000 a week. The i diver has been shipped across the con-: tinent to 1'acifb' ports secret I v from I 1 iu:e to I i :u e in hea ily guarded ex- : uress trains. Six mnntjis ao, according iO a recent treasury report, there were j 130.000,000 silver dollars in The vaults. ! i)u November 21 t he number had shrunk j :o 3oS,riP00n, and the process of melt- ' ;ng down i o 1 1 i 1 1 1 v..' . There h; bef.n a Oio;'ti;e ci silver t i mi - how t the world: c,-r mint the Kin open n v.-;, r 'jot into :':!) -wwii:. and The pn.-e r, i',n api.roxirnatcly ! an otin-e. ''ho f iiintn-iers r.; the oj i ;: in m p.j;nw;i y a ' r- p t e-en r t ' ;r-. :ind it I will require some time for them to figure fig-ure out upon what basU business is to ; be transacted. A great man v of the 'nations are practically bankrupt and all j of them are jea lously guarding their ! gold reserves. The United States has ome out of the war in a strong financial finan-cial positiun and our currency will not : bp depreciated. We shall probably bo I a ble, by working in harmony with irt-n t Britain, w hich is not so badly off I considering the awful strain of the last four years, to avoid anything like a ! widespread panic among the smaller i-ountries. But. it is evident that there is not enough metallic money with which to transact the world's business, and we believe the time lias arrived when it. would be safe to use much more ! silver than has been used since the j white metal was demonetized in the second Cleveland administration. lnd;a and China and tho other oriental coun-I coun-I tries will continue to absorb vast quantities quan-tities of silver for some time to come, and its use as money will not have any j appreciable effect upon the gold standard, stand-ard, which is certain to be maintained, j Gold has been withdrawn from circulation circu-lation in the United States and silver dollars are not so plentiful as they were I even in the western states, where they i are preferred to notes of small denominations. denomi-nations. But whatever kind of money ! wo use, it is worth one hundred centB on tho dollar, thanks to the 6urreney ; law, and tlto business of tho country is : not. disturbed by fluctuations in the , lvalue of our medium of exchange. When i i we remember what occurred during the ; civil war and up to the time specie pay-I pay-I ments were resumed in 1878, we have much reasou to be thankful that currency cur-rency reform came when it did. Other-; Other-; wise a financial panic would have occurred oc-curred in this country in 1914. We should have been drained of our gold and conditions might have arisen which ; would 'have presented our getting into the war even in 1917. This is more, or less speculation, but it is easy to see where our present financial strength lies. Overppcculation threw the country coun-try into a financial panic during the Roosevelt administration. But we have emerged from the greatest and most destructive de-structive war of all time with the treasury treas-ury vaults full of gold, with the faith of the people in the money of the country coun-try unimpaired, and with all the other nationR of the earth looking to the United States for help. We can melt down our silver dollars and ship the bars oyer the ocean, and we can extend credits to our allies amounting to hundreds hun-dreds of millions of dollars without impairing im-pairing our financial strength. We do not know what conclusions the political politi-cal economists and those who think in terms of billions will finally reach concerning con-cerning the money of the future, but we are very well satisfied with the present outlook, and we hope no more efforts to eliminate silver will be countenanced, coun-tenanced, by the people of the United States. We are not interested in "free and unlimited coinage at the ratio of 16 to 1," but we insist that, as hundreds of millions of people in the orient demand de-mand the more extensive use of silver as money, we should not fly in the face of Providence by entering into any more combinations to prevent them from getting all the white metal they can use. We believe there has been some change in sentiment on this question ques-tion in the last twenty years. |
