price of silver bullion, but nobody sells merchandise for silver bullion, and its price movements concern very few people. What people generally are concerned about is the prices at which they buy and sell merchandise, stocks, bonds, or any valuable thing. Intrinsically, silver coins are worth, in gold, say thirty per cent.' less than their face value, and we may add that paper money is intrinsically worth nearly one hundred per cent. less than its face value, but the face value itself is all that concerns you, whenever you use the paper or the silver coins in buying or selling anything. If silver coins were not receivable in settlement of debts, if you could not buy goods with them, or if you could not exchange them for gold coins, at the face value of each, then "dislocation," or "outlawry," or "demonetization" might be fairly charged, but the untruth of the charge is demonstrated thousands of times every day, on each side of the Atlantic, ten silver dollars buying as much as a golden eagle will buy, twenty shillings being as valuable as is a sovereign, twenty

11896. Fifty per cent.

francs as a napoleon, and twenty marks as a doppelkrone. If an act of demonetization or outlawry had been passed by the American Congress, or by the legislatures of England, France, or Germany, the equality in the purchasing power of gold and silver coins would have been overthrown. Instead of complaining of the so-called results of an imaginary demonetization of silver, we should be thankful that our legislation, in favor of silver, has not yet resulted in the demonetization of gold.

But if we deny that silver has been either demonetized or outlawed, and deny also that the fall in the price of silver bullion has caused the fall in the prices of commodities, how shall we account for the latter? Fortunately this part of the silver question has been gone over in great detail and been treated in a masterly way by Mr. Wells, in his Recent Economic Changes, the volume already quoted; and nobody can be better informed upon such changes than he, in spite of the appearance that in his general reading there did not

happen to be included a certain chapter in Herbert Spencer's works.

A stock argument of the silver advocate is this: Because silver and commodities have declined together-cause and effect in his mind-therefore, if you advance the price of silver you will advance the prices of commodities. A careful study of the general decline in prices, however, will show that silver and commodities have felt the force of great economic changes, these changes being the cause of the downfall in almost all prices, that of silver included. Any man of business familiar with one or more articles of trade or commerce which have fallen in price, or familiar with the decline in freight and transportation rates during the period since the very high range of 1872, can see that invention and discovery have, one or the other or both, put down prices and rates at least in particular instances; and we have yet to hear of a case of decline which can be attributed to the decline in silver, excepting, of course, in goods manufactured from this metal.

Invention and discovery have played a great part in the decline of silver itself, new mines and new processes yielding greatly increased production; and if we take any of the staple articles, iron, steel, petroleum, cottons, woollens, paper, quinine, tea, coffee, sugar, beef, wheat, etc., etc., a similar story is told of a revolution accomplished or now progressing, everything being put upon the market at much lower cost than ever before. Nothing is easier than to say that prices in general have fallen, because silver has fallen nothing can be more difficult than to prove the connection. The appearance at the same time of two or more phenomena suggests cause and effect; and so when "demonetization" is pointed out as the cause of the decline in the price of silver, and this "demonetization" and this decline are pointed out as the cause of the decline in general commodities, these statements naturally find believers, although there is no better reason for attributing the fall in general prices to the fall in the price of silver, than there would be for attributing the fall in the price of silver to the fall in

general prices. Certainly no fair-minded. person can read Mr. Wells' book without becoming fully convinced that the fall in the prices of commodities and the fall in the rates for transportation are directly due to the force of irresistible economic changes, silver itself being forced down with other things, anti-silver legislation as a force, in comparison, having little appreciable effect.

Not content with proving the naturalness, so to speak, of the fall in prices, Mr. Wells shows, too, that the fall is far from being such an unfortunate thing as the "silverites" claim it to be. Instances of both. the naturalness of the decline in price and the benefit of that decline are afforded by a great number of articles of which, for example, quinine is notable. Formerly the medicinal preparation sold at over one dollar per ounce, and, in a time of civil war in New Granada, it advanced to over four dollars per ounce, but in those times quinine was manufactured solely from that cinchona-bark which could be obtained from trees in the forests of the northern states of South America. Now the trees are cultivated in the East Indies; these