of sectional feeling for demagogic exploitation.

For lack of proper machinery of credit for carrying on the process of
exchange, there seemed to be an absolute shortage in the amount of money
in circulation, and it was this circumstance that had given such force
to the Greenback Movement. Although that movement was defeated, its
supporters urged that, if the Government could not supply additional
note issues, it should at least permit an increase in the stock of
coined money. This feeling was so strong that as early as 1877 the House
had passed a bill for the free coinage of silver. For this, the
Senate substituted a measure requiring the purchase and coinage by the
Government of from two to four million dollars' worth of silver monthly,
and this compromise was accepted by the House. As a result, in February,
1878, it was passed over President Hayes's veto.

The operation of this act naturally tended to cause the hoarding of
gold as the cheaper silver was equally a legal tender, and meanwhile the
silver dollars did not tend to pass into circulation. In 1885, in his
first annual message to Congress, President Cleveland mentioned the fact
that, although 215,759,431 silver dollars had been coined, only about
fifty million had found their way into circulation, and that "every
month two millions of gold in the public Treasury are paid out for two
millions or more of silver dollars to be added to the idle mass already
accumulated." The process was draining the stock of gold in the Treasury
and forcing the country to a silver basis without really increasing
the amount of money in actual circulation or removing any of the
difficulties in the way of obtaining supplies of currency for business
transactions. President Cleveland recommended the repeal of the Silver
Coinage Act, but he had no plan to offer by which the genuine complaints
of the people against the existing monetary system could be removed.
Free silver thus was allowed to stand before the people as the only
practical proposal for their relief, and upon this issue a conflict soon
began between Congress and the Administration.

At a convention of the American Bankers' Association in September, 1885,
a New York bank president described the methods by which the Treasury
Department was restricting the operation of the Silver Coinage Act so
as to avoid a displacement of the gold standard. On February 3, 1886,
Chairman Bland of the House committee on coinage reported a res