Salt Lake Evening Democrat

SECRETARY MANNING'S POSITION

In yesterday's Democrat, Secretary Manning's version of the efforts of this Government to obtain an international agreement for a free coinage of both gold and silver into unlimited legal tender money was given. Its failure is a matter of history. Now that the invention of the single gold standard by Great Britain has returned to plague the inventor, the Secretary would wait for the English Government to move in the matter of a third monetary conference, toward which he thinks the India trouble is forcing it. He proceeds to discuss four mooted points covering, in his estimation, the silver problem in its present aspect as a national question.

First, with regard to the demand for a free coinage of silver, he assumes that the practical result of such a coinage would be to prevent the coinage of gold. This he says would, "bring us to the Asiatic silver basis." Why "Asiatic" rather than American, for America is the great producer of silver. But he says: "The proof is simple that the free coinage of silver now, would at once entail a silver basis." His "simple proof" is but a bundle of naked assertions.

As to the second proposition which is to call another International Monetary Conference, the Secretary, for reasons already mentioned, does not favor it at present. Of Great Britain he says: "When, if ever, she perceives her interests to lie in retracing the errors of 1816, she has the means of apprising other powers of a change in her opinions. Conferences and treaties would then be in order to a practical result."

Thirdly, shall the United States continue to buy and coin silver? To go on as we are, says the Secretary, is the least creditable of all the courses open to our choice. It is a policy which tends to a silver standard of value. In doing this it remits all control of the silver question to adverse, if not hostile, interests. It deprives the United States of perfect equality of position (non-coinage) in negotiation with foreign powers. It is an expense and a tax; a disturbance in the Treasury, which threatens the currency without relieving the taxpayer. It is heaping up a heavy load of silver coin needing to be kept, but increasingly difficult to keep. It is glutting our currency with depreciated metal, while also impeding the only means of reversing that depreciation and restoring its value. When the monetary dislocation began, the people of other nations had large stocks of silver coin subject to depression; we had none. We created one and are daily adding to it. It is the taxation of an otherwise over-taxed people $24,000,000 per annum; a taxation to disorder our domestic currency, jeopardize the stability of our unit of value, and accumulate a surplus which on the one hand presses the Treasury toward a silver basis, and on the other hand tempts Congress beyond a frugal expense.

Fourth—To stop the purchase of silver is our only choice, our duty and our interest. Stopping the purchase and coinage of silver is the first step and the best which the United States can take in doing their great part to repair the monetary dislocation of the world.

We have given above the salient points in the Secretary's argument (?) in favor of the pet scheme of himself and his brother gold bug bankers to bolster up gold and cheapen silver. Many of his assertions which he offers us as arguments are utterly baseless. For instance, his foolish talk about taxing the overtaxed people $24,000,000 annually in the purchase of silver, when official reports show that of the 29,000,000 and over silver dollars coined last year the bullion out of which they were coined cost in the market but $23,000,000 and a fraction, and that was paid for in silver dollars at par value, leaving over $6,000,000 of clear profit to the Government. And in spite of wrongful discrimination by every Secretary of the Treasury since the law of 1878 was passed, the people have gladly received the silver dollars and the silver certificates until at present there is but little over $70,000,000 surplus in the Treasury, $50,000,000 of it being the result of the one-fifth profits of the entire coinage of about 250,000,000 of silver dollars.

Then the Secretary must have his frequent sneer at what he calls the "Asiatic basis of silver," when he knows that our own country produces about three-quarters of the world's annual yield of silver. If England will flaunt her single gold standard in the face of the world because she thinks her money kings have got a corner on the yellow metal, why may not the United States meet her with a single silver standard and beat her at her own game? If England will continue to enforce the single gold standard, and Germany, in her suicidal imitation of John Bull, will play into the hands of a comparatively few money lenders, let America, the greatest and richest nation in the world, cease to play second fiddle in the monetary concert, and with her inexhaustible mines of silver and gold fix the prices of her own metallic products and adopt the single silver standard if she see fit.

That it will meet with determined opposition by the small minority of gold monopolizers, whose yellow treasures, enhanced in value by a legislation ruinous to the debtor class, and to nine-tenths of the people, is evidenced by the suicidal policy and the specious advocacy of it tendered the Nation by Secretary Manning.

But, if as he says, "To stop the purchase of silver is our only choice," why argue against it? Let us not butt against the inevitable!