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Show H Not Altogether Sordid. H The New York World says: ' "Mr. Bryan al-K al-K ' lowed the silver mine owners to contribute H $288,000 to the campaign fund of 1S9G, and there BB could be no more sordid purpose than that 1 which permitted those contributions." How abot the insurance companies that Mc made their contributions, amounting to millions R of dollars, to be enabled to perpetuate their Hr steals? How about the tariff manufacturers who contributed con-tributed their millions in order to keep fastened upon the country their monopoly? Ho'w about the bondholdeis who were afraid in case of Mr. Bryan's election that they would have their interest and principal paid in money only about twice as good as what they paid for their bonds? How about the national banks that contributed contrib-uted their millions that they might deposit bonds, draw the intererst upon them and still have ninety per cent of their capital to do business on and a guarantee for all the money they had deposited in the treasury of the United States for the loans which they put out? It will be noted that all these classes paid their money for an artificial use of, or grab upon, the money in the United States. None of them .disturbed .dis-turbed the World none except the contributions of silver miners; and it saw that what they gave was altogether sordid; that they wanted to stop the lrain upon their property which by a sneak had been cut in two. It would seem as though that was but a natural desire. But it was not limited to them. A great panic had swept the country. The property of the whole country had been reduced fifty per cent by the warfare upon silver. The silver miners were anxious to bring this back and anxious to save what was justly theirs of what they took from the mines. That they were right, two very striking examples were supplied the people of the United States all the time. One was poor, degraded Mexico, that prospered pros-pered all the time, while the most eminent workers work-ers In the United States grew poor all the time for twenty years. The other was France, which, while the world was doing its best to destroy silver as basic money, was using it in conjunction conjunc-tion with gold, without reducing Its ratio to gold at all, and was prosperous beyond all calculation. The silver miners in the west thought if they could have silver restored it would restore the value of all the depreciated property in the country. coun-try. They not only thought so, but they knew it. They knew something of the history of gold and silver. They knew that when Mexico and Peru poured out their floods of silver upon Spain and reawakened the business life of all Europe that the ratio only changed three points between gold and silver. They knew that silver money was just as good as gold and maintained a steadier stead-ier value so long as the nations let the two metals run side by side. They knew that the object of demonetizing silver was to reduce the real money j of the country fifty per cent and thus double the value of the interest and principal which the nation na-tion Avaa paying on government, railroad and 1 other bonds. They knew that the demonetization of silver was the most gigantic steal of all the ages, and they wanted to arrest and turn back that infamy if possible. They knew that half the people of this world could do business in no other form of money. They wanted to increase the trade, or at least maintain the trade which the country had with the Orient and with Spanish America. . They saw business shrunken to the lowest limits. They saw that nearly every farm in the United States was mortgaged and that thousands and tens of thousands of them had been lost because of the demonetization of silver They cried out that there must be an increased volume of money before there could be any relief, re-lief, and no visible supply was in sight except through the restoration of silver. That money since ha3 come is no impeachment of their intelligence, intel-ligence, no vindication for the thief who made the stringency. They were working for their own and because by a few votes they failed, they are losers up to date of quite three hundred millions mil-lions of dollars since then that ought to have been theirs. If the law compelled the New York World to put in ads at fifty cents on the dollar below the present price; if it arbitrarily insisted that the World should be delivered to subscriber for $1 per annum, would the World acquiesce, or would it make a fight? And would it be fair, if it did make a fight, to declare that it was due to the most sordid motives in the world? Up to date the World has had no criticism of the millions of dollars which in 1896 Mark Hanna drew from the favored classes and with which he debauched the United States. That $288,000 which the silver miners gave to Mr. Bryan's cause, and which did not pay the legitimate expenses ex-penses of the campaign, still rankles in the breast of the World and the kindred sheets of the World which were subsidized to justify the striking down of half the money of the country, the ruining ruin-ing of millions of people and the perverting of public 'sentiment. A vote of the people of the United States today, if left to them fairly, would give a majority in favor of the restoration of silver. Had it been done two years ago there would have been no panic in New York laet autumn. The reason silver was long ago set aside as a i precious metal was because it contained all the attributes that gold contains except density, and I the experience of the world had taught that i these two metals not only had every natural ele- I ment to be perfect measures of values, but that so difficult is it to procure the two metals there i can never- be a surplus under the sun. That i after thousands of years of trial the rule remains j as fixed today as it ever did and the world never needed silver as basic money so much as it does today. This being true, the assailing of the motives mo-tives of the men of the west because to save I themselves from perpetual robbery in the future they contributed a small sum to be legitimately used in election, indicates on the part of any j great metropolitan journal that does it that its own conscience is uneasy for the part it took in fastening the infamy of creating a single gold standard upon the world. I The example of Mexico and of France is just I as pertinent today as it was twelve years ago. Both have moved along, the one under the high- est enlightenment, the other in a land where nine-tenths of the people are but peons. There has been no panic, no stringency, no tying up of business. They have gone right along. As it is, our trade is shrinking with the Orient and with South America because exchanges are advancing all the time between those countries. Our manufacturers manu-facturers cannot sell their goods; our ships cannot can-not get cargoes to carry to those countries. By and by some sensible man will make it clear to the eastern manufacturer that if silver were real money he would receive more value for his goods. Ho might stop to think. But at present the whole land is debauched under a mistaken idea that through some policy this country might be swamped with silver. A sufficient answer to that is found in the fact that if every ounce of silver taken from the mines of the United States since the first day that silver was discovered on the Comstock, sixty years ago; if every dollar, we s,ay, had been sent to China it would not give that great unwieldy empire six dollars per capita for its people. And China is in the market perpetually perpet-ually to buy anywhere from 100 to 1,000 milion ounces of silver annually. But it's no matter. The country will come to its senses one of these days. The silver men of old will be vindf cated and the thieves which caused its denur r tization will be proclaimed and branded as enemies ene-mies of their country. |