Treasury, on the other hand, I am sometimes, though rarely, informed
that the government is exercising the option reserved in its contract;
that it is paying exclusively in gold, or exclusively in silver, or
partly in one and partly in the other. These occasional disappointments,
however, never affect the integrity of the money I have in hand, for
whether redeemed in gold or silver, everyone knows that it will be
redeemed at its _face value_, and it accordingly passes unquestioned.

Upon several occasions I present bonds of the government for redemption,
some of them issued previous to the inauguration of the new system, and
others issued afterward. In either case I find that the same system of
redemption prevails as in the example of the notes. Treasury notes,
silver coins, and silver certificates--one and all I discover are also
redeemable like the new notes or convertible into them, so that I need
never concern myself about any matter save their genuineness.

Gold certificates and greenbacks must, of course, be redeemed as their
special contract requires, but, once redeemed, they must reissue in the
new bimetallic notes which I have described. Thus a very simple method
is provided whereby this form of currency may be transmuted into another
without contracting the circulation.

The great desideratum is to make our vast stores of silver available for
ultimate redemptions, and this, natural bimetallism effectually
accomplishes. Our gold reserve would therefore cease to be indispensable
to the preservation of our national credit just as soon as the
greenbacks and gold certificates were converted into the bimetallic
notes or cancelled. But there need be no fear that the gold reserve
would ever become depleted. By removing all danger of the debasement of
our money, by insuring the parity of every dollar of our currency with
gold, and by permanently retiring the greenbacks, we destroy the
incentive to hoard gold, cause its return to the reserve, relieve it of
half the burden it formerly had to sustain, and reduce to a minimum the
tendency to withdrawals. The copious supply of gold thus secured would
enable the Treasurer to waive his option to pay in silver whenever the
customer preferred gold, thereby enabling merchants to use the less
cumbrous metal for foreign shipments. Indeed, it is entirely probable
that the new notes would be preferred to gold in international as well
as in domestic exchanges.

An advantage of e