The Feilding Star. Published Daily. WEDNESDAY, SEPT. 6, 1893. THE SILVER QUESTION

Feilding Star, Volume XV, Issue 58, 6 September 1893, Page 2

The Feilding Star. Published Daily. WEDNESDAY, SEPT. 6, 1893. THE SILVER QUESTION

In an article on the situation at Washington by Professor Goldwin-Smith, which appears in the Nineteenth Century for July, there aro some interesting comments on the silver question. The writer says the immediate difficulty Mr Cleveland the President of the United States, has to grapple with is that created by the silver law, named, with some injustice to Senator Sherman, the Sherman Act, which is heaping up in tho Treasury masses of silver, bought at a prico above its real value, while by flooding the country with silver tokens and with token notes in the shape of silver certificates, are driving out tho gold, as bad money always drives out good, and thus threatening to bring on a currency crisis. How true this opinion was at the time our readers can judge for themselves by the dreadful financial crisis which has since taken place iv the United States. The writer goes on to Bay : Currency is the paradise of chimeras, and in regard to it there is no saying what delusions may prevail. Inconvertible paper money is the delusion of men who have failed to grasp the elementary fact that a bank note is not a piece of money, but an instrument of credit like a cheque, and that when it changes hands gold passes, as in tho case of a cheque, at the bank of issue from the credit of the giver to that of the taker. The forces by which the Silver law was carried, and has been kept in operation, are two — that of the Silver States bent on keeping up the price of their commodity, and that of the party which, like the Greenbacks of happy memory, wants " cheap money " and an easy method of paying dobts. Tkese currency controversies always call ingenuity into play. One economist, apparently so far enlightened as to see that you cannot legislate proportional any more than you can legislate positive valuo into a commodity, proposed to make a coin of half gold and half silver which, he fancied, would be self-balauced, as if the fluctuations in the value of one metal would always be such as exactly to balance those of the other. Another faddist suggested that all the servants of the States, including footmen, should be made to wear silver buttons. Tho payment of congressional salaries in silver was more to the point. It is considered that the only safe course will be to call in the token money and redeem the silver certificates in gold, just as the redemption of greenbacks in gold was the only moans of restoring the currency after the war. The coercion of Congress, by a combination so limited as the Silver men, is an ominous proof of the influence which hungry interests playing on the balance of political parties, may oxert. The same influence is exerted by bodies of enthusiasts, such as the Prohibitionists, exclusively bent on tho attainment of their own special object, and utterly regardless of tho general policy of the country. This a growing distemper of electivo institutions. The writer also says in that connection: " Look at the working of the elective system on which ever side we will, we find that the system is on its trial."