e guides. The external facts of the
Populist movement are accessible in the _Annual Cyclopaedia_; Stanwood,
_History of the Presidency_; Annual Reports of the Secretary of the
Treasury; and Richardson, _Messages and Papers of the Presidents_.
Standard writings on the silver problem are J.L. Laughlin, _History of
Bimetallism in the United States_ (1886, etc.), and F. W. Taussig,
_Silver Situation in the United States_ (1893). Useful details are added
in the biographies of Blaine, Bland, Sherman, and Vance. W.E. Connelley,
_Ingalls of Kansas_ (1909), has included much material upon Populism,
including E. Ware's satirical verses, _Alonzo, or the Kansas Bandit_.
Light is thrown upon Governor J.P. Altgeld and his influence in the
Democratic party by B. Whitlock, "Forty Years of It" (1914), and C.
Lloyd, _Henry Demarest Lloyd_. The _Memoirs of a Varied Career_, William
F. Draper (1908), gives a glimpse of the rigid protectionist attitude. A
stimulating novel, based upon municipal politics in the nineties, is
P.L. Ford's _The Honorable Peter Stirling_ (1894).

CHAPTER XIV

FREE SILVER

Serious students of finance are almost unanimous in their belief that
the adoption of free silver would have brought into operation the
Gresham Law and would have resulted in a reduction of the value of the
dollar. But the motives which divided the United States were less
economic law than personal interest. The creditor foresaw the shrinkage
of his property, and feared it. The debtor saw the lightening of his
debt, and easily convinced himself that the ethics of the case required
such relief for him.

It appeared to the West that the declining prices of the eighties had
been due not so much to overproduction and mechanical invention as to an
appreciation of the dollar. The silver advocate claimed that the money
supply was inadequate to the demands of increasing business, that the
overworked dollars were acquiring a scarcity value, and that their
increase in value was placing an unfair burden upon every person with a
debt to pay. It was the old attitude of the Greenback Northwest, brought
out by a period of debt and depression. In accounting for the scarcity
of money the Act of 1873 seemed important to the West. The
demonetization of silver became a crime, and justice from the Western
standpoint demanded the restoration of the dollar to its old value,--the
value of its silver. Before 1893 the discontent was serious, but had
not come