'You come and tell us that the great cities are in favour of the Gold Standard. I tell you that the great cities rest upon these broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave us our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms, and the grass will grow in every city in this country. 'You come before us and tell us that we shall disturb your business interests. We reply that you have disturbed our business interests by your course. 'Our war is not a war of conquest. We are fighting in defence of our homes, our families, and posterity.'' 1 W. J. Bryan's Speech in Full, pp. 2, 3, and 7; Fry Brothers, 59 Broad Quay, Bristol. CHAPTER V. FOREIGN DEBTS IN LONDON. THE ARGENTINE REPUBLIC CHAPTER VI. THE DOUBLE STANDARD AND THE NATIONAL Debt . PAGE 127 133 APPENDIX. I. GOLD AND PRICES, BEING LETTERS PUBLISHED IN THE The Distinction between Price and Value II. REPORT FROM THE OVERLAND MAIL' OF AUGUST 25, 1893, 175 177 178 183 PREFACE ΤΟ THE SIXTH EDITION, 1889. THE final Report of the 'Royal Commission on Gold and Silver,' which has appeared since the publication of the Fifth Edition of this work, gives to the standard of value a victory of its own, independent of the relative merits of the gold, the silver, or the double standard. A hundred years of argument against the use of the term standard of value may be said to have been brought to a climax by the attack made against it in the interests of the gold party in the second Report of the Royal Commission, to which I replied in the preface to my Fifth Edition; but throughout the Royal Commission's final Report the phraseology of both parties acknowledges the fact of the existence of a standard of value in such a manner that the correctness of the term may, I think, be now considered to be more firmly established than it has ever been before. Though one-half only of the Royal Commission have declared absolutely in favour of bimetallism, the other half have more or less abandoned the old lines on which the gold standard has hitherto been defended. The two points of importance round which they now appear chiefly to rally are the old story of a deluge of silver being ready to be poured from the mines on the reopening of the European B |