Certainly no man will deny to the present Secretary of the Treasury entire rectitude of motive in all his conduct. From the well-known fact that since the passage of the limited coinage act of 1878 all our Secretaries have refrained from purchasing more silver than they were compelled to do by the mandatory provision of that law, it is reasonable to infer that none of them, if called upon to execute a law containing a silver bullion redemption clause, such as is suggested, would feel called upon to make a net purchase of more than $2,000,000 worth in each month; and that none of them would hesitate to exchange for Treasury notes all the monthly purchases of bullion in excess of that amount.
I must be pardoned for directing the attention of Senators on this side of the Chamber to a short declaration of the last Republican National Convention:
The Republican party is in favor of the use of both gold and silver as money.
If party platforms mean anything that clause meant that the Republican party went before the country pledged to the use and to the equal and non-discriminating use of both silver and gold as money. It was well known that throughout the entire West the question of the remonetization of silver was deemed of vital importance, and party orators and the party press, throughout that entire section were severe in their denunciation of the prior administration of its unfriendly attitude toward silver.
I wish in all solicitude and sincerity to advise my Republican friends of the East that this plank in the party platform was construed by the Republicans of the West to mean precisely what it says. They are looking with confidence to this Congress for such action as will fittingly embody in the statutes the principle laid down by the party now in the responsible direction of the Government.
We are told that if silver is given free access to the mints we shall be flooded with it from all parts of the world. Does anybody show where the flood of silver is to come from? Where are the reservoirs that contain it? Not in England, where it is difficult for the people even to get a sufficiency of it for small change to transact the business of the country: not in Germany, where the scarcity of money was so pressing that the government had to abandon the idea of selling silver. Though the stock in France is large her people will never give it up. Silver has been the "shield and buckler" of the French Republic. All she has is coined at the ratio of 15-1/2 ounces of silver to 1 of gold, and its shipment to this country would involve a loss to France, not only of the 3 per cent. difference between the French relation (15-1/2 to 1) and ours (which is 16 to 1), but of 3 per cent. additional in the cost of gathering and shipping it. And after that could only exchange them for Treasury notes. The silver stock in India and the Orient is performing indispensable duty as money, and no "flood" of it can be expected from that quarter. From time immemorial India has been absorbing all the surplus silver of the world. She has never got so much as to appease her appetite for more. So insatiable is her desire for that metal that she has long been known as the "Sink of Silver." China has not a piece of the metal that she can dispose of. Mexico has no stock whatever of silver on hand, except the limited number of coined pieces forming her moderate money circulation, and not a dollar of it can be spared. No country of Central or South America has any surplus silver. Every piece of coined silver in every country in the world is part of the monetary circulation of that country, and even when of short weight and classified as a mere "token" is passing at par as full valued money. No gain could possibly accrue, therefore, to the owners of coined silver anywhere by shipping it to this country for any purpose, and there is no surplus stock of bullion anywhere.