WHY THE WEST NEEDS FREE COINAGE.

BY C. S. THOMAS.

The question which the editor of the ARENA desires me to answer is in no sense a sectional one. It relates to a subject of national concern, and affects the interests and the welfare of all classes and conditions. Whether it be considered from the standpoint of morality and justice, of necessity, or of expediency, the problem absorbs or overshadows all the incidental and involved issues with which politicians and the beneficiaries of existing conditions are so earnestly endeavoring to obscure it. Like the passage of celestial bodies between the earth and the sun, they may for a brief period intercept the fulness of his rays, but when he again looks upon us with eye undimmed, we soon forget the transient moment of eclipse.

There are some reasons peculiar to its resources and environment which justify the desire of the West for free silver. If there were no others, or if these could be satisfied only by retarding the growth and impairing the pros perity of other sections of our country, the West would not ask for free coinage. It would protest against the adoption of a system which must operate for the welfare of one portion of the body politic at the expense and to the injury of the rest. Its patriotism is broad enough to prevent its acceptance of benefits under such conditions; and its comprehension is clear enough to teach it that true happiness and prosperity can be secured only by methods which benefit the masses of the people everywhere. The West, therefore, is primarily in favor of the free coinage of gold and silver at the ratio of 1 to 16, for the same reasons which impel it to believe in the virtues of local self-government, of trial by jury, of habeas corpus, or of the Monroe doctrine. The history of constitutional government, the teachings of our fathers, and the experiences of the past all demonstrate their possession as indispensable to the enjoyment of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." "The West" is one of the commonest of general expressions. It is used to designate a great political and geographical division of the republic. If one were asked to define its limitations, his answer would be largely influ

enced by his environment. To the citizen living east of the Alleghanies, the term comprises everything west of Pennsylvania and north of the Ohio River to the Pacific Ocean. To the man of Chicago or St. Louis it includes a dominion tributary to and west of these great centres. To those living beyond it, the "Big Muddy" forms the line of separation from the East. Whatever allowance may be made for such limitations upon its extent, the fact remains that the term comprises by far the vaster portion of the Union, teeming with unbounded natural resources, and occupied by millions of enterprising and industrious people. The story of its occupation and development has been and will be the story of the nation's industrial rise, progress, and prosperity.

An enumeration of the resources of this vast domain would exhaust the limits of a magazine article. Conceded to be the granary of the world, it is at once the metallic treasure-house of the nation and the principal source of food supply. Its annual yield of grain, live stock, wool, and metals, measured by the existing scale of low prices, is far in excess of two billion dollars. The cotton of the South and the oil of the Rockefellers excepted, it practically supplies the sum total of our exports. It furnishes the great lines of transportation with the bulk of their business and equips our manufactories with much of the raw material essential to their continued operation. It is emphatically the source of production; and as producers its citizens can only prosper through an active and continued demand for their products at prices sufficiently remunerative to balance their cost and leave a fair margin of profit. Without these conditions industry must languish, the development of the country is arrested, debt increases, energy is palsied, and ruin becomes inevitable.

There was a time, not very long ago, when mining, agriculture, and stock-raising in the West were profitable pursuits. The miner, the farmer, and the ranchman thrived apace. Markets were active and constant. Employment was furnished to all who cared to work. The varied occupations to which our vigorous and complex civilization have given rise kept pace with the progress and development of our leading industries. Immigration was attracted by the temptations of reward which the great West offered to labor, sobriety, and intelligence, and was warmly wel comed in a land where people were scarce and opportunities were abundant. The Mississippi, the Missouri, the Plains, the Sierras, each in turn became and ceased to be the fron

The

tier, and then the frontier itself became a memory. valleys gave their harvests and the plains their flocks to the sustenance of the people, and the mountains yielded their silver and their gold to be coined into money whose value was kept steady and constant by the restrictions of nature upon the sources of supply, and whose volume swelled in harmony with the growth of product and of population. The muscle and enterprise of the western people became an efficient lever for the development of the country, using capital borrowed in the current money of the realm as its fulcrum. Manufactures came in their turn; railways penetrated the farthest reaches of the national domain, and content smiled upon a section which seemed blessed with all that nature and free government could bestow.

But these conditions were not destined to long duration. Nature continued to be as bountiful as before; man's energy and capacity for toil flagged not; the sower still reaped his harvest; the herds of the stock-grower increased and waxed fat; the mines yielded their continued measures of metallic wealth. The universal need for all these productions was undiminished. Wealth and population increased, and statistics revealed the steady expansion of commercial pursuits. Yet prices fell, markets dwindled, exchanges became stagnant. Grain could not be sold for the cost of production; live stock would hardly pay the cost of transportation; corn became a substitute for coal. But barter could not be made to supersede the functions of money. The yearly balance appeared on the wrong side of the ledger. The torpor of hard times retarded everything save taxes and interest on the mortgage; these thrived apace, and their persistent demands for payment compelled resort to fresh loans and increased rates of interest. Hard times were upon us; from whence or why they came, or how long they would continue, were questions asked by all which few could answer. High tariffs, home and foreign markets, over-production, improved facilities for production, cheap transportation,-these and similar causes were assigned for the general depression. Some of them had doubtless contributed to the result; but the great and underlying primary cause of these forced and unnatural conditions was the radical transformation of our monetary system in 1873, and the ultimate demonetization of silver.

"The benumbing influences" of a shrinking circulation are conceded by all students of monetary science. A steady and constant fall of prices is its surest and deadliest symptom. A steady and constant rise in the purchasing power

of money is but an expression of the same thing. The dry rot of this all-pervading evil has been our sore affliction for many years, and it must continue until the knife is applied to the root of the evil. Apologies and explanations will not effect a cure; nor can the demon be exorcised by angry denials of its existence.

The demonetization of silver was intended to enhance the value of primary money by lessening its quantity and limiting it to a metal small in bulk and easy to control. Gold is such a metal. It is unfit for coins of small denominations, and therefore cannot circulate as money of the people. Silver, on the other hand, is unfit for coins of large denominations. The dollar is its largest representative, and as fractions of the dollar it finds its way into the hands and pockets of all classes. This makes it emphatically the money of the people, and beyond the power of any combination to gather it in and store it away. It was therefore marked for destruction, although its actual value exceeded that of gold when the blow fell upon it.

But the fundamental purpose of those who encompassed its overthrow was postponed of its full accomplishment by the passage and operation of the Bland Act. Its two millions of dollars per month, accompanied by an increase of public revenues and a renewal of industrial and commercial activity, postponed if it could not avert the catastrophe. Meantime there were other methods of currency contraction, and resort was had to all of them. National bank circulation was retired, and time contracts were made payable in gold, while silver could be rejected when offered in settlement of clearing-house balances, until congressional action should inhibit the practice. Besides, agitation could disturb the financial situation, and the cautious and the timid could thus be impelled to hoard their treasures. Finally, by the cunning interpolation of a "parity clause" in the act of 1890, a construction was secured which not only did violence to itself, but perverted the entire purpose and meaning of the law whereby greenbacks became redeemable in gold only at the option of the holder and silver discredited by the government. The sacred reserve, with no law for its being and no necessity for its existence, became subject to pillage by the devotees of honest money. The object lesson of the New York bankers, the coincident closing of the India mints, the presidential proclamation. the submission of an obsequious Congress, and the deed was done. The adverse times which had so long buffeted the West reached their climax in a commercial convulsion

without parallel in the history of mankind. Gold monometallism became the order of the day. All commerce and industry are founded upon it, and public and private debts, the annual interest upon which is equal to its volume, have become payable in that metal and that only. The citizen who protests against this appalling situation is a lunatic and a robber; the patriot who demands a return to the system of the fathers is an anarchist to be exterminated with or without due process of law.

The people of the West, prostrate under these conditions, desire the free coinage of gold and silver at the old ratio, because they are honest and want to pay their debts. In times past they have borrowed large sums of money and agreed to return the same with interest. It was legally and morally a part of their agreements that they should return these loans in money similar in kind and value to that which they had received. Without such an equitable and just understanding, borrowing and lending would have been impossible. With it as an element of the contract, borrowing and lending were mutually profitable. But between the date of the loan and the date of payment money has become the equivalent of gold. That and that alone can now satisfy the covenant of the bond. As a consequence, the obligation has become doubly onerous. The effort to discharge its superadded burden is unavailing; property has shrunken in value, and the debtor is becoming bankrupt. This is cruelly unjust to him. He feels and has a right to feel that his government has allied itself with his creditor for his undoing, and he protests against its disregard of the sacred purposes of its creation and existence. He realizes that though he has paid two-thirds of the national debt of 1865, with interest exceeding the principal sum, it nevertheless requires more of his products to pay the remaining third than was originally necessary to pay it all. He realizes that the sum of the public and private debts of his section of the Union is vastly greater than the national debt ever was, and that the annual interest account can only be paid by fresh borrowings. He reads the romantic treasury statements of the erstwhile champion of bimetallism, but his personal knowledge of the slender monetary circulation of the country is too keen to enable him to enjoy the humor of their conclusions. He does not believe in an unlimited irredeemable paper currency, which is the alternative of bimetallism. He sees but one remedy for himself and for his country-the restoration of silver, the indiscriminate use of both metals as