Los Angeles Daily Herald

Sherman and Silver.

The Ohio Republicans have given Senator Sherman a tremendous endorsement for the presidency. When a great State like Ohio in formal tones asks that the nation shall honor itself by naming one of her sons for the highest place in this world's gift, the request carries a vast potency with it. But John Sherman can never be nominated for President while he holds to his expressed views on the silver question. The West and South will not take such a standard-bearer. One would think that the action of ex-Secretary Manning and ex-Treasurer Jordan would make the most confirmed goldite stop and question himself. It is but two years since Mr. Manning was doing his utmost to have silver as money destroyed. It is but a year since he advised that the coinage of silver dollars should cease in the United States. As he explained the scheme, if the United States ceased to recognize as money the white metal, and the coin which the fathers made the unit of values, England would be forced to recognize it. Now he is, as the head of a banking establishment, doing what the silver men have all along insisted the government should do. He is receiving and storing silver bullion and issuing certificates for it, which certificates are passing for money.

What does all this mean? Simply that Mr. Manning has reached the conclusion that silver is really as precious a metal, in the proportion established by thousands of years' experience, as gold; that the world needs all that it can get of it for the sovereign use of money, and that the utmost amount which the mines can supply of both gold and silver will not be enough to keep pace, as measures of value, with the mighty swelling wants of commerce. Any statesman who cannot see this same thing will not do for a standard bearer for the Republican party next year. The wrong that was worked upon the debtor class by the demonetization of silver must not be much longer continued. It has reduced the debt-paying capacity of the United States quite 35 per cent.: it has made it necessary to give 35 per cent. more wheat or corn or cotton or anything that the labor of man produces to pay $100 in interest or $1000 of principal, than it would have required except for the vicious and stupid legislation. The result is that if before the farmer could make 35 per cent profit by working his farm, it is now all that he can do to barely live. That is not all. It has cut off from our producers a valuable market. At silver prices the men of England buy wheat and cotton of India and pay in merchandise reckoned at gold rates. They can thus import wheat and cotton from India and sell them at ostensibly lower prices than they paid for them, and still make money. This reduces their cost to rates lower than the American farmer and planter can raise and export them, and hence to the extent that India can supply England and Europe the United States is shut out of those markets. Any statesman who closes his eyes to these facts and persists in following in the narrow groove marked out by the bankers of London and New York, is not one whom the men of the West will accept as their candidate for President.

We believe that the action of ex-Secretary Manning will supply the silver men with arguments enough, in the coming session of Congress, to force justice to be done; to force the passage of a law which in substance shall read as follows— "It shall be the duty of the Secretary of the Treasury to receive any American silver bullion, nine hundred fine, that shall be offered at any mint or assay office of the United States, and to receipt for the same in certificates, which certificates shall be a legal tender for debts everywhere in the United States. The purchase of silver by the Government is hereby suspended, and the coinage of silver is hereby left to the discretion of the Treasury Secretary." Senator Sherman should look up and try and detect the writing on the wall.—Salt Lake Tribune.