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Show I Dishonest Praise ol the Dead. The gold-press of the east continues to shower eulogies upon the memory of Grover Cleveland as the man apparently raised up by God to save the credit and the honor of the nation when both wore assailed by a host of bad or foolish men who wanted to debase the money of the land by forcing a re-recognition of silver as basic money. As faithful Roman Catholics gather to canonize some marvelous priest who gave himself to such service to his God and his fellow men, as marked !i him as more than mortal in his life work; as ancient Greece finally pictured as a god in the ji neither world because of his prowess and valor j, while among men, so now these eulogisits lay garlands on the memory of Grover Cleveland, ! and some of them give him the post of honor when the names of Washington and Lincoln are metioned with his. This is becoming a trifle weaiisome. It be- gins to look as though those writers were seeking, seek-ing, through praise of him, to poultice their own consciences for the part they played in those days when, after twenty years of shame and sin and falsehood, they finally compassed the destruction destruc-tion of silver as basic money. Before that the Silver miners of the west lost $300,000,000 through I, their robbery. Since then they have lost as much more, and they do not relish the thought that the men who Avrought the steal, now feel it a duty to either call them would-be thieves or to hug themselves tor saving these foolish mineis from themselves. The history of It all is very simple. A great war swept this republic. repub-lic. To raise money the government had to sell bonds. It was obliged, too, to Issue vast amounts of irredeemable paper money. Those philanthropists philan-thropists of the east took this money that was then rated at from 37 cents to GO cents on the dollar, and bought with it the bonds. In the meantime the gold and silver miners of Uall-! Uall-! fornia, Nevada, Idaho and Montana supplied the ' gold that enabled the struggling government to meet its interest account I The war linally ran its course, and with the I return of peace readjustments were In order. The first move was to have the ..interest on these 1 bonds which had been bought with paper prom ises to pay at an average of perhaps 45 cents on the dollar paid in specie, that Is, either silver or gold. This was accomplished. The bonds were drawing -so much interest that the Interest equaled the principal every sixteen years, and every year for what had cost the bondholder $450 for every $1,000 that he owned in bonds, he drew down on an average of $60, or $138.-33, or about 30 per pent on his real investment. This was the situation In 1873. The government at the time owed $2,200,000,000 of this interest-bearing debt, and tho states and cities and corporations corpora-tions owed more than as much more. But peace had come and the business ot the country was rapidly advancing, and the men who owned these bonds saw that as things were moving mov-ing the bonds would eooii be paid or be refunded at greatly reduced interest. How to avert either menace to them became their study. Now, through the centuries silver had maintained main-tained itself boslde gold as basic money. it was the steadier metal, for It was the money of the poor. Half mankind to this day know no' othre basic money. So sensitive was the market that silver dollars could not be kept in circulation circula-tion in his country, because our ratio was 1G to 1, and there was a profit In buying these dollars dol-lars and sending them to continetal Europe, where the ratio was 15 1-2 to 1, or to Great Brlt-ai, Brlt-ai, where the ratio was 15 to 1. Suddenly a cry was raised that there was so much silver in the Comstock that it had ceased to be a precious metal, but it never declined in value. Its place as a precious metal, a perfect measure of values, had been established before the first page of written history was penned. In point of fact, in the Comstock every ton of ore reduced gave only 56 per cent of its value in silver, sil-ver, 44 per cent being gold. The crucial fact which must not be overlooked was silver maintained its place beside gold. It never shaded one point. It maintained its place, and there was as there had ever been immediate imme-diate demand for every ounce as fast as it could be produced. But 'an Insidious bill was introduced into congress, purporting to be for the better regulation regula-tion of the currency. Only those who were directly di-rectly interested knew its purport. Under a misapprehension mis-apprehension it passed both houses, and under the same misapprehension it was signed by the president and became a law. It domonitized silver. sil-ver. That legislation has cost the country vastly more than did the civil war. Silver was changed from being a measure of values into a mere commodity. com-modity. Like all other commodities, it began to shrink in value as measured by gold. The law in effect threw away halt the money of the world, and the rule Inviolable as the motion of the stars is that values advance or recede precisely as the volume of money increases or decreases. This was what was intended. It was that the money received in interest and principal on the bonds, on all interest-bearing securities, should have double purchasing power. When measured in gold, silver began to depreciate, and the people peo-ple began to clamor to have It restored; when It was pointed out that wheat and cotton and corn and land and all forms of matured property were falling in the same ratio that silver was falling; then those harpies that had wrought the ruin turned and asked the people through their purchased pur-chased press if they wanted to pay their debts In debased money. And they hired a Chicago professor and a Yale professor, and that old enemy of his country, Atkinson, to prove that every writer on political economy had been wrong that money had no Influence on prlsec. The country began to giow poor. Farmers who owed a little on their farms struggled on for years and lost them. The distress was everywhere every-where save among those who were collecting their interest. Young men and women by thousands thou-sands loft tlKilr homes and flocked to the cities, to live by theii wits, and thousands of both sexes wore lost. Finally, in 1892, Mr. Cleveland was elected president the Second time. During his first term ire had shown his hostility to silvdr. So soon as, he was Inaugurated those same Interest-gatherers precipitated a panic upon the country, the president called congress in extraordinary ex-traordinary session,- and as agreed upon, bulldozed bull-dozed congress, with tho help of that same Bagag MPPW JBMWBt in ii mil' , ,''1 JJi!glLJ-!J; money power, to finally destroy sliver as money,, and the country Avas lelt so prostrated that hope , I well nigh died out of men's hearts. The conspiracy con-spiracy which had been pursued for twenty j years finally succeeded. Since then the pluto- ' crats made rich out of the muck of their country have pretty nearly run the country. That the vo'.ume of money has been restored through causes that no man in 1893 could predict pre-dict or anticipate, does not matter, and does not in the least take away any of the shame and : sin and robbery of that act which began in 1873 and culminated In 1893, and wrought purely what would be wrought now could one half the gold In tho world be taken out and sunk in the sea. And the memory of It all is yet too fresh to make men who know tho facts feel kindly when one of the chief participants, albeit, ho did not know the truth, is held up as one of th-e greatest of statesmen that the land has ever known, because be-cause unseemly praise for tho dead is only justified jus-tified when in bestowing that praise no wrong is done to the living and no vital principle Is violated. |