he fear of an overwhelming flood of silver
and a forced descent to silver payments that even the repeal of these
laws did not entirely cure the evils of their existence.

While I have endeavored to make a plain statement of the disordered
condition of our currency and the present dangers menacing our
prosperity and to suggest a way which leads to a safer financial system,
I have constantly had in mind the fact that many of my countrymen, whose
sincerity I do not doubt, insist that the cure for the ills now
threatening us may be found in the single and simple remedy of the free
coinage of silver. They contend that our mints shall be at once thrown
open to the free, unlimited, and independent coinage of both gold and
silver dollars of full legal-tender quality, regardless of the action of
any other government and in full view of the fact that the ratio between
the metals which they suggest calls for 100 cents' worth of gold in the
gold dollar at the present standard and only 50 cents in intrinsic worth
of silver in the silver dollar.

Were there infinitely stronger reasons than can be adduced for hoping
that such action would secure for us a bimetallic currency moving on
lines of parity, an experiment so novel and hazardous as that proposed
might well stagger those who believe that stability is an imperative
condition of sound money.

No government, no human contrivance or act of legislation, has ever
been able to hold the two metals together in free coinage at a ratio
appreciably different from that which is established in the markets of
the world.

Those who believe that our independent free coinage of silver at an
artificial ratio with gold of 16 to 1 would restore the parity between
the metals, and consequently between the coins, oppose an unsupported
and improbable theory to the general belief and practice of other
nations and to the teaching of the wisest statesmen and economists
of the world, both in the past and present, and, what is far more
conclusive, they run counter to our own actual experiences.

Twice in our earlier history our lawmakers, in attempting to establish
a bimetallic currency, undertook free coinage upon a ratio which
accidentally varied from the actual relative values of the two metals
not more than 3 per cent. In both cases, notwithstanding greater
difficulties and cost of transportation than now exist, the coins whose
intrinsic worth was undervalued in the ratio gradually and surely
disa