our
trade and commerce with all the world. In the consideration of
such a question we should not be controlled by previous opinions
or bound by local interests, but, with the lights of experience
and full knowledge of all the complicated facts involved, we should
give to the subject the best judgment which imperfect human nature
allows. With the wide diversity of opinion that prevails, each of
us must make concessions in order to secure such a measure as will
accomplish the objects sought for without impairing the public
credit or the general interests of our people. This is no time
for visionary theories of political economy. We must deal with
facts as we find them and not as we wish them. We must aim at
results based upon practical experience, for what has been probably
will be. The best prophet of the future is the past.

"To know what measures ought to be adopted we should have a clear
conception of what we wish to accomplish. I believe a majority of
the Senate desire, first, to provide an increase of money to meet
the increasing wants of our rapidly growing country and population,
and to supply the reduction in our circulation caused by the retiring
of national bank notes; second, to increase the market value of
silver, not only in the United States, but in the world, in the
belief that this is essential to the success of any measure proposed,
and in the hope that our efforts will advance silver to its legal
ratio with gold, and induce the great commercial nations to join
with us in maintaining the legal parity of the two metals, or in
agreeing with us in a new ratio of their relative value; and, third,
to secure a genuine bimetallic standard, one that will not demonetize
gold or cause it to be hoarded or exported, but that will establish
both gold and silver as standards of value, not only in the United
States, but among all the civilized nations of the world.

"Believing that these are the chief objects aimed at by us all,
and that we differ only as to the best means to obtain them, I will
discuss the pending propositions to test how far they tend, in my
opinion, to promote or defeat these objects."

Those of us who were in favor of good money, whether of gold or
silver, or whether issued by the government in the form of notes
or currency by the national banks, all to be maintained at par with
each other and of equal purchasing power, were constantly charged
with reducing the volume of money. I showe