potentates are honorable men, who are proud of their good name, who treat honestly and fairly those with whom they deal; who do not see their interest in the ruin of their customers, and who know that their own prosperity is safest in the prosperity of all. Therefore they are against free coinage. It is not these, but the worst element of the “money power,” that free coinage will serve. The real pitiless bloodsuckers in the West and South are their own village usurers, their own sharpers around the courthouses, not the legitimate banker or Eastern capitalist.
The agitators denounce the gold standard as the device of monarchs and aristocrats, while the history of the world teaches that from time immemorial it was a favorite trick of unscrupulous despots to fleece their subjects by debasing the coin of the realm, and that those who out of the monetary confusion evolved fixed standards of values and money that would not cheat have always been ranked among the most meritorious benefactors of mankind, and especially of the poor and weak.
They seek to inflame the vanity of the American people by telling them that we are great and strong enough to maintain any monetary system we like, and to keep up the value of our money without regard to all the world abroad—while our own history teaches us that a century ago the American people were strong enough to shake off the yoke of Great Britain, but not strong enough to save their continental money from declining in value to nothing; that in recent times the American people were strong enough to subdue a gigantic rebellion, but not strong enough to keep an indefinite issue of greenbacks at par, and that this Republic may be able to conquer the world, but it will not be able to make twice two five, or to make itself richer by watering its currency.
They speak of the silver dollar as the money of the Constitution, while they must know that there is not one
