des for the making of changes in the legal tender
coin of the country and for substituting as legal tender, coin of only
one metal instead of two as heretofore."

=The Decline in the Value of Silver.=--Absorbed in the greenback
controversy, the people apparently did not appreciate, at the time, the
significance of the "demonetization" of silver; but within a few years
several events united in making it the center of a political storm.
Germany, having abandoned silver in 1871, steadily increased her demand
for gold. Three years later, the countries of the Latin Union followed
this example, thus helping to enhance the price of the yellow metal. All
the while, new silver lodes, discovered in the Far West, were pouring
into the market great streams of the white metal, bearing down the
price. Then came the resumption of specie payment, which, in effect,
placed the paper money on a gold basis. Within twenty years silver was
worth in gold only about half the price of 1870.

That there had been a real decline in silver was denied by the friends
of that metal. They alleged that gold had gone up because it had been
given a monopoly in the coinage markets of civilized governments. This
monopoly, they continued, was the fruit of a conspiracy against the
people conceived by the bankers of the world. Moreover, they went on,
the placing of the greenbacks on a gold basis had itself worked a
contraction of the currency; it lowered the prices of labor and produce
to the advantage of the holders of long-term investments bearing a fixed
rate of interest. When wheat sold at sixty-four cents a bushel, their
search for relief became desperate, and they at last concentrated their
efforts on opening the mints of the government for the free coinage of
silver at the ratio of sixteen to one.

=Republicans and Democrats Divided.=--On this question both Republicans
and Democrats were divided, the line being drawn between the East on the
one hand and the South and West on the other, rather than between the
two leading parties. So trusted a leader as James G. Blaine avowed, in a
speech delivered in the Senate in 1878, that, as the Constitution
required Congress to make both gold and silver the money of the land,
the only question left was that of fixing the ratio between them. He
affirmed, moreover, the main contention of the silver faction that a
reopening of the government mints of the world to silver would bring it
up to its old relation with gol