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Show Gold, Silver, Interest and Prices PRESIDENT TAFT wants very extensive reclamation rec-lamation work inaugurated and rushed to completion, and wants authority to issue and sell bonds to pay for the same. If bonds are issued the interest and principal of them will have to be paid. If they are twenty-five-year bonds, then for every dollar so obtained, two dollars will eventually have to be paid. What Is tho need of that? If $500,000,000 is required, why compel the people to pay 1,000 millions extra in taxes in the coming twenty-five years? We have $346,000,000 in circulation In greenbacks. They are doing vastly more work than any like amount in gold is doing. They were as good as gold twenty years ago, when the money and property values of the country were not one-third one-third their value at the present day. A new adjustment ad-justment of the laws and a new issue or tnem to tho amount of $500,000,000, and every dollar of the new issue, backed as the present $346,000,000 is, would be as good as gold. And they would bear no Interest, and with the steadily increasing increas-ing revenues Qf the country, after ten years, probably prob-ably sooner, $100,000,000 per annum of them could be called in and destroyed and the people would not feel their issue, nor their retirement. For that matter, their calling in coujd begin with the sales of tho first lands reclaimed, and the billion bil-lion dollars which, with the bond issue, will have to be paid by the people, would never have an existence, and the men who pay the taxes would save that billion. Better still, if Congress would rehabilitate silver, sil-ver, the silver produced in this country, and put it in circulation in the form of silver certificates, the money in that form would do the work, within with-in three months the oriental exchanges would be restored to their old place and our export trade with half the world, which is now lost, would be resumed. Within the year silver would do Just 1 aa good as gold the world around, and our trade relations with the myriads of the orient and with South America, would be better than any other 2 nation would have. If the people would only understand that noth ing ever lessened the value of silver in terms of gold, except the withdrawal by legislation of recognition rec-ognition of it as primary money, they might be more reasonable. The writer heard an educated eastern gentleman say yesterday: "Tne mason people cling to gold as their standard of values, is because its value never changes, never fluctuates." fluctu-ates." "When told that it had fallen 30 per cent I in value in the last fifteen years, he became half indignant. Taking a $20 piece from his pocket, he said: "Is not that $20, the same that it was fifteen years ago?" "Oh, no!" was tne lepiy; "I can buy your $20 with half the potatoes, eggs, Ior butter or apples or any other food, or with half the land that I could twenty years ago." He insisted that what was given him as a test was unfair, that commodities might rise, but the gold remained the same. When asked how the commodities would fare, were half the gold in the country thrown into the sea and the mines closed ; down, he was obliged to admit that the effect ! would be to lower prices, but still insisted that 1 $20 in gold would still be $20. He did not know that when silver was demonetized de-monetized (which was throwing away half the world's money), gold was at once inflated, as measured by the world's products it was at j length inflated 100 per cent. That is, it required two bushels of potatoes or apples, or two dozen eggs, to buy as much gold as half their amount bought fifteen years before. But interest-bearing securities did not depreciate. The country an4 people owed vast sums which they had to pay in gold. It made three-fourths of them bankrupt. Now the business is reversed. So great has , been the influx of gold that it has fallen in value, and with it so have interest-bearing securities. For instance, if in 1872 a man gave a note for six years at 6 per cent per annum, for say $1,000, j the interest and principal when the note fell due i of course amounted to $1,3G0. If, when he gave the note, he could have covered the whole sum j with seventeen acres of his land, when it fell due it required quite thirty-four acres to pay it, and under forced sale fifty acres. Now, had he given the same note six years ago, he could meet it now with half the land or half the products of the land, compared with their value when he 1 gave the note. Which shows that gold Is just like the eggs we eat at breakfast. It requires just about twice the money to buy a aozen eggs I now as it will after St. Valentine's day, when the hens resume their duties. But some one will ask: "Why, if gold is de-1 de-1 predated, as you say, would you remonetize sil ver and add to the money volume of the world?" The answer is to vastly increase trade, do a more gigantic business, and make a market for the silver sil-ver in lands which have been absorbents oi silver sil-ver for a thousand, years. |