of almost 5,000,000 depositors. In many cases they represent the labor and economies of years. Any depreciation in the value of the dollar would defraud every man, woman and child to whom these savings belong. Every dollar of their earnings when deposited was worth one hundred cents in gold of the present standard of weight and fineness. Are they not entitled to receive in full, with interest, all they have so deposited? Any legislation that would reduce it by the value of a single dime would be an intolerable wrong to each depositor. Every bank or banker who has accepted the earnings of these millions of dollars to the credit of our citizens must be required to pay them back in money not one whit less valuable than that which these banks and bankers received in trust.

There are, in this country, nearly six thousand building and loan associations, with shareholders to the number of 1,800,000, and with assets amounting to more than $500,000,000. Their average of holdings is nearly $300 per capita, and in many cases they represent the savings of men and women who have denied themselves the comforts of life in the hope of being able to accumulate enough to buy or build homes of their own. They have aided in the erection of over a million of houses, which are now affording comfort and shelter for five millions of our thrifty people.

Free coinage at the arbitrary rate of sixteen ounces of silver to one of gold would be equivalent to the confiscation of nearly half the savings that these people have invested. It would be tantamount to a war upon American home-makers. It would be an invasion of "the homes of the provident," and tend directly to "destroy the stimulus to endeavor and the compensation of honest toil." Every one of the shareholders of these associations is entitled to be repaid in money of the same value which he deposited by weekly payments or otherwise in these companies. No one of them should be made homeless because a political party demands a change in the money standard of our country, as an experiment, or as a concession to selfishness or greed.

The magnitude of the disaster which would overtake these and cognate interests becomes the more strikingly apparent when considered in the aggregate. Stated broadly, the savings banks, life insurance and assessment companies, and building loan associations of the country hold in trust $15,309,717,381. The debasement of the currency to a silver basis, as proposed by the Chicago platform, would wipe out at one blow, approximately $7,963,504,856 of this aggregate. According to the report of the Department of Agriculture, the total value of the main cereal crops in this country in 1894 was $995,438,107. So that the total sum belonging to the people, and held in trust in these institutions, which would be obliterated by the triumph of free and unlimited silver coinage, would be seven and one-half times the total value of the annual cereal crop of the United States. The total value of the manufactured products of the country for the census year of 1890 was $9,372,537,283. The establishment of a silver basis of value, as now proposed, would entail a loss to these three interests alone equal to eighty-five per cent. of this enormous output of all the manufacturing industries of the Union, and would affect directly nearly onethird of its whole population.

One hundred and forty millions of dollars per annum are due to pensioners

of the late war. That sum represents blood spilled and sufferings endured in order to preserve this nation from disintegration. In many cases, the sums so paid in pensions are exceedingly small; in few, if any, are they excessive. The spirit that would deplete these to the extent of a farthing is the same that would organize sedition, destroy the peace and security of the country, punish, rather than reward, our veteran soldiers, and is unworthy of the countenance, by thought or vote, of any patriotic citizen of whatever political faith. No party, until that which met in convention at Chicago, has ever ventured to insult the honored survivors of our struggle for the national life by proposing to scale their pensions horizontally, and to pay them hereafter in depreciated dollars worth only fifty-three cents each.

The amounts due, in addition to the interests already named, to depositors and trust companies in national, State and private banks, to holders of fire and accident insurance policies, to holders of industrial insurance, where the money deposited or the premiums have been paid in gold or its equivalent, are so enormous, together with the sums due, and to become due, for State, municipal, county, or other corporate debts, that if paid in depreciated silver or its equivalent, it would not only entail upon our fellow countrymen a loss in money which has not been equaled in a similar experience since the world began, but it would, at the same time, bring a disgrace to our country such as has never befallen any other nation which had the ability to pay its honest debts. In our condition and considering our magnificent capacity for raising revenue, such wholesale repudiation is without necessity or excuse. No political expediency or party exigency, however pressing, could justify so

monstrous an act.

All these deposits and debts must, under the platform of the Republican party, be met and adjusted in the best currency the world knows, and measured by the same standard in which the debts have been contracted or the deposits or payments have been made.

Still dealing sparingly with figures, of which there is an enormous mass to sustain the position of the advocates of the gold standard of value, I cite one more fact, which is officially established, premised by the truism that there is no better test of the growth of a country's prosperity than its increase in the per capita holdings of its population. In the decade between 1880 and 1890, during which we had our existing gold standard, and were under the conditions that supervened from the act of 1873, the per capita ownings of this country increased from $870 to $1,036. In those ten years the aggregate increase of the wealth of our country was $21,395,000,000, being fifty per cent. in excess of the increase for any previous ten years since 1850, and at the amazing rate of over two thousand millions of dollars a year. The framers of the Chicago platform in the face of this fact, and of the enormous increase over Great Britain, during this same gold standard decade, of our country's foreign trade and its production of iron, coal and other great symbols of national strength and progress, assert that our monetary standard is "not only unAmerican but anti-American," and that it has brought us "into financial servitude to London." It is impossible to imagine an assertion more reckless and indefensible.

The proposition for free and unlimited silver coinage, carried to its logical

conclusion, and but one is possible, means, as before intimated, legislative warrant for the repudiation of all existing indebtedness, public and private, to the extent of nearly fifty per cent. of the face of all such indebtedness. It demands an unlimited volume of fiat currency, irredeemable, and therefore without any standard value in the markets of the world. Every consideration of public interest and public honor demands that this proposition should be rejected by the American people.

This country cannot afford to give its sanction to wholesale spoliation. It must hold fast to its integrity. It must still encourage thrift in all proper ways. It must not only educate its children to honor and respect the flag, but it should inculcate fidelity to the obligations of personal and national honor as well. Both these great principles should hereafter be taught in the common schools of the land, and the lesson impressed upon those who are the voters of today and those who are to become the inheritors of sovereign power in this Republic, that it is neither wise, patriotic, nor safe, to make political platforms the mediums of assault upon property, the peace of society, and upon civilization itself.

Until these lessons have been learned by our children, and by those who have reached the voting age, it can only be surmised what enlightened statesmen and political economists will record, as to the action of a party convention which offers an inducement to national dishonesty by a premium of forty-seven cents for every fifty-three cents' worth of silver that can be extracted from the bowels of the whole earth, with a cordial invitation to all to produce it at our mints and accept for it a full silver legal tender dollar of one hundred cents rated value, to be coined free of charge and unlimited in quantity for private account.

But vastly more than a mere assertion of a purpose to reconstruct the national currency is suggested by the Chicago platform. It assumes, in fact, the form of a revolutionary propaganda. It embodies a menace of national disintegration and destruction. This spirit manifested itself in a deliberate proposition to repudiate the plighted public faith, to impair the sanctity of the obligation of private contracts, to cripple the credit of the nation by stripping the Government of the power to borrow money as the urgent exigencies of the Treasury may require, and, in a word, to overthrow all the foundations of financial and industrial stability. *

*

I give, in another chapter, the Republican money plank, and here present the interpretation placed upon it by the Presidential and VicePresidential candidates in order to show the position taken by the opposition during the campaign. The portion of Mr. McKinley's letter most quoted was the declaration that the mills should be opened instead of the mints. This was an epigrammatic sentence and did considerable service in turning public attention from the money question to the tariff question. The country was flooded with large posters illustrating this sentiment.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

I

DEMOCRATIC PLATFORM.

GIVE below the Democratic national platform, adopted at Chicago on the 9th day of July, 1896, together with my letter of September 9th, accepting the Democratic nomination.

Democratic Platform.

We, the Democrats of the United States in National Convention assembled, do reaffirm our allegiance to those great essential principles of justice and liberty, upon which our institutions are founded, and which the Democratic party has advocated from Jefferson's time to our own-freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of conscience, the preservation of personal rights, the equality of all citizens before the law, and the faithful observance of constitutional limitations.

During all these years the Democratic party has resisted the tendency of selfish interests to the centralization of governmental power, and steadfastly maintained the integrity of the dual scheme of government established by the founders of this Republic of republics. Under its guidings and teachings the great principle of local self-government has found its best expression in the maintenance of the rights of the States and in its assertion of the necessity of confining the General Government to the exercise of the powers granted by the Constitution of the United States.

The Constitution of the United States guarantees to every citizen the rights of civil and religious liberty. The Democratic party has always been the exponent of political liberty and religious freedom, and it renews its obligations and reaffirms its devotions to these fundamental principles of the Constitution.

Recognizing that the money question is paramount to all others at this time, we invite attention to the fact that the Federal Constitution named silver and gold together as the money metals of the United States, and that the first coinage law passed by Congress under the Constitution made the silver dollar the monetary unit and admitted gold to free coinage at a ratio based upon the silver-dollar unit.

We declare that the act of 1873 demonetizing silver without the knowledge or approval of the American people has resulted in the appreciation of gold and a corresponding fall in the prices of commodities produced by the people; a heavy increase in the burden of taxation and of all debts, public and private; the enrichment of the money-lending class at home and abroad; the prostration of industry and impoverishment of the people.

We are unalterably opposed to monometallism which has locked fast the

prosperity of an industrial people in the paralysis of hard times. Gold monometallism is a British policy, and its adoption has brought other nations into financial servitude to London. It is not only un-American, but anti-American, and it can be fastened on the United States only by the stifling of that spirit and love of liberty which proclaimed our political independence in 1776 and won it in the war of the Revolution.

We demand the free and unlimited coinage of both silver and gold at the present legal ratio of 16 to I without waiting for the aid or consent of any other nation. We demand that the standard silver dollar shall be a full legal tender, equally with gold, for all debts, public and private, and we favor such legislation as will prevent for the future the demonetization of any kind of legal-tender money by private contract.

We are opposed to the policy and practice of surrendering to the holders of the obligations of the United States the option reserved by law to the Government of redeeming such obligations in either silver coin or gold coin.

We are opposed to the issuing of interest-bearing bonds of the United States in time of peace and condemn the trafficking with banking syndicates, which, in exchange for bonds and at an enormous profit to themselves, supply the Federal Treasury with gold to maintain the policy of gold monometallism.

Congress alone has the power to coin and issue money, and President Jackson declared that this power could not be delegated to corporations or individuals. We therefore denounce the issuance of notes intended to circulate as money by National banks as in derogation of the Constitution, and we demand that all paper which is made a legal tender for public and private debts, or which is receivable for dues to the United States, shall be issued by the Government of the United States and shall be redeemable in coin.

We hold that tariff duties should be levied for purposes of revenue, such duties to be so adjusted as to operate equally throughout the country, and not discriminate between class or section, and that taxation should be limited by the needs of the Government, honestly and economically administered. We denounce as disturbing to business the Republican threat to restore the McKinley law, which has twice been condemned by the people in National elections, and which, enacted under the false plea of protection to home industry, proved a prolific breeder of trusts and monopolies, enriched the few at the expense of the many, restricted trade and deprived the producers of the great American staples of access to their natural markets.

Until the money question is settled we are opposed to any agitation for further changes in our tariff laws, except such as are necessary to meet the deficit in revenue caused by the adverse decision of the Supreme Court on the income tax. But for this decision by the Supreme Court there would be no deficit in the revenue under the law passed by a Democratic Congress in strict pursuance of the uniform decisions of that court for nearly one hundred years, that court having in that decision sustained Constitutional objections to its enactment which had previously been overruled by the ablest judges who have ever sat on that bench. We declare that it is the duty of Congress to use all the Constitutional power which remains after that decision, or which may come from its reversal by the court as it may hereafter be constituted, so that the burdens of taxation may be equally and impartially laid, to the end that wealth may bear its due proportion of the expense of the Government.