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Show BOTH GOLD AND SILVER. The Cleveland "Plain Dealer" lie-views lie-views the Question of Silver Coinage. ' ' . The Secretary of the Treasury devotes a very large portion of his report to a discussion dis-cussion of the silver question. This: is very proper, as the silver question is the most important question now connected with the national finances. The Secretary is positive that the present pres-ent status of the silver in the coinage is-not is-not satisfactory, and that it ought to be changed. In this the Plain Dealer is agreed with the Secretary; the present status is not satisfactory. The government now is compelled by law to buy silver bullion and coin it into at least two million silver dollars of standard stand-ard weight and fineness every month. This is wrong. There ought to be' no such thing as compulsory coinage. But when Secretary Manning suggests that the proper thing to do is to stop coining coin-ing silver' dollars altogether, the Plain Dealer does not agree M'ith him. When he asserts that we have all the silver coin in the country now that we can make use of M-ith safety and to advantage, the Plain Dealer is constrained to think that he is in error. The Secretary objects that silver dollars cannot be made to circulate, and that they have to be kept stored in vaults. This is in a general sense true enough, but the conclusion that he draws from this fact, that they do not circulate because be-cause they are silver coins and worth something less than their face value in gold is not a true conclusion. If they had more silver in them they would not circulate any more than they do now," and if a silver dollar was M'orth intrinsically intrinsic-ally more than a gold dollar it still would accumulate in the government vaults. Gold coins do not circulate even to the extent that silver coins do. People are not accustomed to cany gold eagles, half eagles or quarter eagles in their pockets when they go to market and in the ordinary ordi-nary transactions of trade these coins are seen but rarely. People do not want them, and object to being paid in them even more strenuously than they do to receiving re-ceiving silver. And "so the reason that silver dollars do not circulate is the same reason that gold five, ten and twentv dollar dol-lar pieces do not circulate, and that "is because be-cause any kind of big coin is cumbersome, cumber-some, inconvenient, easily lost, and in every respect less to be desired than a paper pa-per bill representing it in value. The Secretary seems to think that if we were to stop now M-e could get along with the silver dollars. We have two hundred and fifteen millions, but if more are coined . there Mill be various sorts of financial trouble. But this same story has been told and retold by the gold money men for years. And yet under a very defective silver coinage law, based upon a wrong principle we have coined over two hundred hun-dred millions of Silver dolla rs and nnf rmo of the dire calamities predicted has happened. hap-pened. Gold has not been driven out of the country ; it has not been hoarded any more than it has always been hoarded and will alM'ays be, and trade and business busi-ness have been benefitted more than injured in-jured by the continued coinage of silver. - The proper plan is not to stop the coinage coin-age of. silver. . It is to put the .coinage on a common sense basis. It is not to discriminate dis-criminate against silver bv declaring that gold is the only metallic standard of money, it is to recognize coin that is gold and silver, one equal with the other' as the basis of currency, as the constitution, consti-tution, contemplates and" is required by the very nature of things. The remedy is not to declare that -there shall be no more silver coined, it is to say that silver and gold may be coined whenever there " is any of either coin, and that metallic money shall be gold and silver money. The thing to do is to make coinage free. |