.

_Ratio of silver to gold._--More directly important in its effect upon
exchanges is the unequal fluctuation of gold and silver when both are made
the standard of value. That silver and gold are from independent sources,
subject to variations of their own in product and processes of extraction,
makes it impossible that they should sustain always the same ratio to each
other in value.

A careful study of the subject by Professor Rogers shows that early in the
thirteenth century one pound of gold was worth ten pounds of silver, at
the close of that century would buy twelve and one-half pounds of silver,
and in the middle of the fourteenth century bought thirteen and
three-fourths pounds; but in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, after
the new world was pillaged, one pound of gold bought from ten and one-half
to twelve pounds of silver. In the seventeenth century fifteen pounds of
silver went for one pound of gold, and in the eighteenth, fifteen and
one-half pounds. Early in the nineteenth century the ratio was fixed in
this country at sixteen of silver to one of gold, and that estimate was
assumed to be essentially correct as late as 1877, when a pound of gold
would exchange in the market for three and one-half pounds of platinum,
seven pounds of aluminum, sixteen pounds of silver, seventy-one pounds of
nickel, 942 pounds of tin, 1,696 pounds of copper. Twenty years have
produced great changes in both the total annual products and the relative
cost of mining. The estimate of 1877 would now be incorrect for any of the
metals named. A pound of gold now buys 1,540 pounds of aluminum, the
change being due to an invention for reducing aluminum ore. It now takes
about thirty-seven pounds of silver to pay for one pound of gold, a change
in part due to new systems of coinage in which silver plays a subordinate
part, but chiefly due to the greatly increased product of rich mines and
greatly improved methods of reducing ores.

_The cheaper money drives out the good money._--In any system of coinage,
employing both silver and gold as standards, it is found by actual
experience, repeated hundreds of times, that a change in the ratio between
the two metals in open market always leads to hoarding for speculative
purposes of the most costly metal of the two.

Thus, in our country previous to 1873, when silver was worth more than
one-sixteenth of its weight in gold, uncoined silver was necessarily worth
more than coined silver f