The Scranton Tribune

Senator Quay's denial of the withdrawal yarn is not voluminous, but it covers the ground.
An Ineffectual Dodge.
As the national campaign draws nigh, the Democratic press, quite generally at least in the east, is responding to the hope and wish of Mr. Cleveland that the currency issue shall be made the dominant one. There is a well-defined purpose in this movement. Its aim is to divert public attention from the Democratic party's mistakes: to turn, if possible, the thoughts of the people away from Democracy's unsatisfactory record during the past three years of its unsuccessful administration of the national government, by interposing a new problem, concerning which it may be possible to confuse the public mind and thus render less obnoxious a new bid by Democracy for power.
This new plan of campaign is faithfully reflected in the columns of the Philadelphia Record, one of the ablest and certainly one of the most ingenious advocates that Democracy has. Not only does it strive, from day to day, to distort the facts as to the inefficiency of the Wilson bill, but it has already begun to publish subtle appeals for a re-alignment of the people with reference to the currency question. In its issue of Thursday it printed a diagram purporting to exhibit our "top-heavy currency system," whereby the $100,000,000 gold reserve is made to support 136,000,000 ounces of silver bullion, $136,719,250 worth of treasury notes, $344,377,604 worth of silver certificates and $346,681,016 worth of greenback legal tenders; or, in other words "$9,000,000 in immediate gold liabilities against every $1,000,000 of gold assets."
The thought at once suggested by this showing is that it proves the fallacy of trying to base the whole currency of this great and growing nation upon a single metal, gold. Yet since under present laws gold is necessarily the base, what more simple remedy can be proposed than to require that the gold reserve shall be doubled or trebled and that no part of it shall ever be used to pay current expenses? Had such a law been in force during the past three years, it is probable that the Democratic party would not have dared, in the Wilson act, to pass a law which made it necessary for Uncle Sam, every little while, to draw on his gold reserve fund to pay actual running expenses. With no deficiency tariff there would have been no unsettling of public confidence, no starting of the "endless chain" whereby notes once canceled by the paying out of gold are made, through bond purchases followed by bond deposits for new circulation, the means of a second, a third, an indefinite number of raids upon the gold reserve.
The fact that under a surplus-accumulating protective tariff system this "endless chain" method of robbing Peter to pay Paul was unknown shows that the seat of difficulty is not in the currency system, but rather in the failure of the Democratic party to provide by law for revenues sufficient to pay the government's actual, current expenses. Correct that failure and the difficulty, in its immediate phases, will soon disappear, leaving for ultimate adjustment, as circumstances shall render expedient, the broader question of monometallism or bimetallism, concerning which all parties are now divided.
It is amusing to hear the calamity artists of the free trade press trying to convince the manufacturers of the United States that they don't need reciprocity. In some lands such a display of nerve would bring on the police.