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Show Mr. Frewen on Silver THE promised article from Mr. Moreton Frewen in the North American Review on the "Century and Sliver," Is printed in the current number. He declares as his first object ob-ject in the article that it is an "appeal to the youth of America to study carefully a question which, in the doubt and drift of the last thirty years, as a deep seated disease, is certainly perilous, peril-ous, perhaps even fatal to our western civilization." civiliza-tion." And he adds that as the gold prices of silver sil-ver rise and fall, so do our exchanges with 800,-000,000 800,-000,000 of Asiatics rise and fall. For 2,000 years or more the Asiatic has absorbed ab-sorbed silver. His "divine hunger" is for that metal. It represents all his labor, his captal, his conditions of work and sacrifice. Thus, when silver and the silver exchanges fall, then for every ev-ery Asiatic desire of our goods, gold and our gold prices have advanced and his power to purchase from us is proportionately reduced. "Since 1896, owing to the limit and inflation of our currency, occasioned by the abundance of " gold supplies, gold prices (and wages) in the west have been rising with unexampled rapidity, while silver prices and wages In the Orient have slowly receded. This price condlton must greatly great-ly contract the purchasing power of the Asiatic in gold standard countries, but when to this is added the fact that there has been an also unprecedented un-precedented fall in the exchange value of his money, a fall of almost thirty per cent In the past twenty months, is it wonderful that our export ex-port trade to Asia should be In a state of collapse, col-lapse, and that the open door of Asia Is now a door that only opens outward? "In all the world's history of two metals, there have been two and only two catastrophic falls in the gold values of silver, the present date falling back to July, 1907, and the almost equally serious ser-ious and more sudden collapse in June, 1893. Smaller falls than these two have not been infrequent in-frequent since 1873, and even on such occasions the result in price in gold prices, measured by Asiatic currency, has impaired the purchasing power of a myriad people in the east, and thus reduced many staple freights on which the well-being well-being of all trade is built up. But the cosmic falls in the price of silver in 1907 and 1873, were followed, fol-lowed, just as we should expect, by two financial convulsions, each of which cuts the leaves of a new volume in financial history. "It seems but a little matter, this fall of some sixteen cents an ounce in silver bullion, just as to primitive man a tiny crack in the earth's crust must have seemed a little matter, but today, whether it Is in San Francisco or in Manhattan Island, there comes this little fissure and the vast superimposed structures, whether of concrete con-crete or of credit, crumble and collapse. "At the Brussels monetary conference In 1893. Baron Do Rothchlld, who represented Great Britain, Bri-tain, said: 'Gentlemen, I need hardly remind you that the stock of silver In the world is estimated esti-mated at some thousands of millions, and if this conference breaks up without achieving any definite defin-ite result, there may be a depreciation in the value of that commodity frightful to contemplate and out of which a monetary panic may eventuate, even-tuate, the far-reaching effect of which it is not possible to forecast.' " f Then Mr. Frewen traces what happened when that Avarning was unheeded. A few weeks later H the greatest collapse in tho price of silver was H ever known by distress of far-reaching offecU H Every bank in Australia save one closed its doors, H while one-fourth of the entire railroad mileage Ml f the United States passed into tho hands of Wbj1 receivers. Hj The fall in silver in 1893 was caused by the K closing of the Indian mints to free coinage. Its B fall in 1907 was caused by the falluro of the H monsoon rains in India and temporary cessation H of her exports of soil products, "Jfoe crisis of H '93 was attributed to the long previous Baring af- H of her exports of soil products. The crisis of H 1907 to presidential indiscretions, but the root K cause was far different: it was the stimulous af- Hl forded by the collapse of exchanges to Oriental H exports and the sudden contraction of all that K A'sia Imports. Only thirty-five years ago the H' Hong Kong exchange in London was four shil- Hl lings and two pence. Today it is one and nine H. pence. H "Let me translate the statement from Its final H, vernacular of the men in the street. A few years H ago when a Chinaman wanted to buy English cot- B tons he bought ten sovereigns: that is, a bill H of exchange for ten pound sin London for thirty- H one of his silver taels. Today, while his labor H and his products bring him no more taels than in H 1873, he must give seventy-seven taels for this B same bill of exchange for ten pounds. H "Is It any wonder then, that notwithstanding H the splendid efficiency of the American railroad H service to the Pacific and American lines of well H equipped steamships, that American exports to H the Orient languish so that San Francisco and H Seattle, Portland and Vancouver, which should be H , emporiums for a vast growing trade with Asia, H must content themselves with a mere coastwise H business? Such, then is the position to each H fresh fall in silver, as by an electric contact, the H manufacturing activities of Asia respond. We H have seen the mills in Bombay and on the Hugli, the boot mills of Concord, a thousand scattered factories throughout China and Japan fostered into profitable life by the lower and lower exchanges. ex-changes. It is not too much to affirm that in thirty years England has seen the entire character char-acter of her trade revolutionized. The houses of tho great merchant princes, who formerly imported import-ed into Asia the fabrics of Europe and England, are largely in liquidation or have now become exporters instead of importers." Tho above is enough to show the character of this article and to show how the indifference of the United States to the question of silver has about destroyed her trade with one-half the people peo-ple of this earth. The question is so plain, the facts are so convincing, that we do not see how the business men of the United States can sit by calmly and see the work go on which reduced for them the trade of the world to the trade of only half the world and that at a gross disadvantage, for the other half conies In with reduced prices to compete with them. We do not wonder that Mi Frewen wants the youths of the country to study the question. He evidently is in despair over the indifference of his own country and ours. It is true that unless the silver question is picked up and handled In a statesmanlike manner in the next three or four years It will be useless for the United States to talk about the trade of the Pacific. Japan and China will be able to take all that trade away from us and take more than half the trade of the outside world. |