t of March by the vote of 123
yeas and 100 nays. In the Senate it was referred to the committee
on finance, and reported back with amendments. The third section
of the bill, as it came from the House, provided for the coinage
of the silver dollar, of the weight of 412.8 grains troy, standard
silver, and made that dollar a legal tender at its nominal value,
to an amount not exceeding twenty dollars in any one payment, except
for customs duties and interest on the public debt, and that the
"trade dollar" should not, thereafter, be a legal coin. This
section was stricken out.

In the remarks made by me, upon this bill, on the 10th day of April,
1876 , I gave, in detail, the history of each of the coinage laws
of Great Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and Italy.
I had taken great pains to collect this information and to procure
translations of the laws of the several countries named. The then
recent changes, made by Germany, and their effect upon the coinage
of other nations, were carefully stated. The general conclusion
which I drew from a reference to these statutes of various countries,
were:

"First. It is impossible, in the nature of things, to fix the
precise value of silver and gold. We have tried it three times
and failed.

"Second. Whenever either coin is worth more in the market than
the rate fixed by the law, it flees from the country. That we have
twice proved. That is the admitted economic law. It is the Gresham
law; a law of currency named from the name of its discoverer. He
wrote a book to show that always the poorer currency would drive
out of circulation a superior currency; and his book gave name to
the theory that is called the law of Gresham. It is the universal
law of political economy that, whenever two metals or two moneys
are in circulation, the least valuable will drive out the most
valuable; the latter will be exported.

"The third proposition is that the example of several great European
nations, as well as of the United States, proves that to prevent
the depreciation of silver the tendency of modern nations is to
issue it as a token coinage somewhat less in intrinsic value than
gold, and maintain its value by issuing it only as needed, at par
with the prevailing currency, and to make it a limited legal tender.
I may say that has been acted upon by every great Christian nation.
Russia and Austria have not yet gold coinage at all, but still they
have their values b