er

Gold and Silver Output of the World, 1861-1911 In Ounces

(Based on United States Statistical Abstract, 1912, pp. 796, 797)]

The panic of 1893, the decline of silver, and the repeal of the Sherman
Law stimulated the activities of those who believed in free silver and
produced formal steps to bring it into politics. A silver convention,
held in Chicago in August, 1893, denounced the "Crime of 1873," and
Governor Waite recommended to the Colorado Legislature that it open a
mint of its own for the coinage of legal-tender silver dollars. At state
conventions, in 1893 and 1894, both parties adopted silver planks. The
Nebraska Democrats rejected such a plank in 1893, but in 1894, after a
caucus of free-silver Democrats in Omaha, they adopted a demand for the
immediate restoration of free-silver coinage "without waiting for the
aid or consent of any nation on earth."

At the congressional election of 1894 the Republicans regained control
of both Senate and House and many of the silver candidates were left at
home. Some thirty, who had sat in the Fifty-third Congress, joined in
March, 1895, in a call for the adoption of free silver as a party
measure. To the iniquity alleged to exist in the gold standard was added
the aggravating fact that its defenders had wealth and were often
directors of corporations. The measure had become a class contest. Its
textbook was found in _Coin's Financial School_, a little book with
simple dialogue and graphic illustration, that popularized the Western
view of free silver and reached hundreds of thousands with its apparent
frankness. Free silver had by 1895 outgrown the Populists, and had
overshadowed other measures of reform before either party had taken a
frank attitude respecting it. "I have been more than usually
despondent," wrote the originator of the Wilson Bill, who had lost his
seat in 1894, "as I see how the folly of our Southern people, in taking
up a false and destructive issue, and assaulting the very foundations of
public and private credit, are throwing away the solid fruits of the
great victory, solidifying the North as it never was solid in the
burning days of reconstruction, and condemning the South to a position
of inferiority and lessening influence in the Union she has never before
reached."

When the Fifty-fourth Congress met in 1895, Reed was again enthroned as
Speaker, but the spread of silver sentiment had undermined party
loyalty. Cleveland's annual Message co