higher prices by
both operations. If any man doubts that an increased gold supply in Europe
would increase the selling price of our farm surplus, I ask him to examine
the figures for the twelve years following the discovery of gold in
California, or the history of prices in the century following the
discovery of America--an era described by all economists as one of
inflation. Is there any reason why a like cause should not now produce
like effects?

=In the meantime, however, all the other nations would dump their silver
upon us and we should be overloaded with it.=

Where would the silver come from? The best authorities agree that there is
not enough free silver in the world to even fill the place of our gold,
which, you say, would be expelled. And right here is where the advocates
of the gold standard contradict every well-established principle of
political economy, and every lesson of experience, by declaring that the
transfer of all our gold to Europe would not cheapen it there, and that
free coinage would not increase the value of silver. They insist that we
should still have "50-cent dollars." Stripped of all its fine garniture of
rhetoric, their proposition simply amounts to this: The sudden addition of
20 per cent. to Europe's supply of gold would not cheapen it, and making a
market here for all the free silver in the world would not raise its
value; laying the burden of sustaining an enormous mass of credit currency
on one metal instead of two has added nothing to the value of that metal;
a thirty years' war on the other metal was not the cause of its
depreciation in terms of gold, and if the conditions were reversed,
greatly increasing the demand for silver and decreasing the demand for
gold, they would remain in relative values just the same. If those
propositions are true, all political economy is false.

=Government cannot create values, in silver or anything else.=

You have seen it done fifty times if you are as old as I. During the war,
government once raised the price of horses $20 per head in a single day.
On a certain day the land in the Platte Valley, for perhaps one hundred
miles west of Omaha, was worth preemption price; the next day it was worth
much more, and in a year three or four times as much. Government had
authorized the construction of the Union Pacific Railroad, and before a
single spade of earth was turned, millions of dollars in value had been
added to the land. It had created a