can people. Silver has
always been a favorite metal with mankind from the beginning.
While gold may be the standard of value, it is too precious
to be a convenient medium of payment for small sums, such
as enter into the daily transactions of ordinary life. It
is said that you can no more have a double standard, or two
measures of value, than you can have a double standard, or
two measures of distance. But the compensating effect may
be well illustrated by what is done by the makers of clocks
for the most delicate measurements of time, such as are used
for astronomical calculations. The accuracy of the clock
depends upon the length of the pendulum and the weight which
the pendulum supports. If the disk at the end of the pendulum
be humg by a wire of a single metal, that metal expands and
shrinks in length under changing atmospheric influences, and
affects the clock's record of time. So the makers of these
clocks resort to two or three wires of different metals, differently
affected by the atmosphere. One of these compensates for
and supplements the other, so that the atmospheric changes
have much less effect than upon a single metal.

Beside the fact that I thoroughly believed in the soundness
of bimetallism, as I now believe in it, I thought we ought
not to give our antagonists who were pressing us so hard,
and appealing so zealously to every debtor and every man in
pecuniary difficulties, the advantage, in debate before the
people, of arraying on their side all our great authorities
of the past. We had enough on our hands to encounter Mr.
Bryan and the solid South and the powerful Democratic Party
of New York and the other great cities, and every man in the
country who was uneasy and discontented, without giving them
the right to claim as their allies Alexander Hamilton, and
George Washington, and Oliver Ellsworth, and John C. Calhoun,
and Daniel Webster, and Henry Clay, and Thomas H. Benton.
I was, therefore, eager that the Republican Party should state
frankly in its platform what I, myself, deemed the sound doctrine.
It should denounce and condemn the attempt to establish the
free coinage of silver by the power of the United States
alone, and declare that to be practical repudiation and national
ruin. But I thought we ought also to declare our willingness,
if the great commercial nations of the earth would agree,
to establish a bimetallic system on a ratio to be agreed upon.

Some of the enemies of t